


Let Yourself Fall Ill

by valancysnaith



Category: X-Men (Alternate Timeline Movies), X-Men (Movieverse), X-Men: Apocalypse (2016) - Fandom, X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Am I the only person on ao3 who ships psylocke and raven?, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Hurt/Comfort, Missing Scene, post-XMA
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-27
Updated: 2016-07-25
Packaged: 2018-07-10 14:54:10
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 15
Words: 23,763
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6989971
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/valancysnaith/pseuds/valancysnaith
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Narrative blank spaces/missing scenes post-XMA. Erik comes down from a metal-high, gardens. Jubilee deserved better. Raven drinks too much, spills secrets. PSYLOCKE.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Withdrawal

**Author's Note:**

> Homeslices, I have some _feelings_ about XMA. They are strong, they are ill-formed, they are in much need of catharsis via fanfic. They are mostly love for Jean and Ororo and Mystique and Moira and Psylocke and also concern for the tragic loss of Erik's family/Charles's hair. They are about men who cry and the women who rule them/the world. 
> 
> Basically I have so many fic wants and no patience at all so I'm writing them myself.

There were a hundred chances for Magneto to slip away again between the battlefield and Cairo International Airport. While they waited for Hank to come down with an unconscious and shockingly bald Charles in his arms, while Raven relearned how to breathe, while the laser kid and the blue kid helped the fast kid make a cast and crutch out of rubble for his broken leg—Magneto could have run at any time. The thought came to him vaguely. It was something he would have done, once.

Instead he sat on a boulder, took off the helmet, scrubbed his hand through his sweaty hair. He wondered if he should go to Charles. He wondered if he should begin some kind of cleanup of the damage he’d caused. He wondered if he should disappear now while they still tolerated him, before they and the authorities turned on him again. He wondered when he’d last eaten or slept.

To do something useful, he found two trucks that were only partially crushed, fixed them enough to be serviceable, and floated them to the base of the pyramid. His powers fluctuated when the metal was still six feet off the ground and there was a sudden snap and painful recoil like a rubber band stretching until it broke somewhere inside him. Pain spiked in his head. Then it spiked everywhere and he could barely see. There were voices above him. The blue kid had a hand on his shoulder and had teleported him into the back of one of the trucks before he could protest.

They jostled and bounced over debris for miles, though Magneto had a feeling these cheap pickup trucks wouldn’t have been the smoothest rides even on perfectly paved roads. It was his last coherent thought before he began throwing up over the side. He dimly realized he wasn’t well, that something like a hangover or withdrawal symptoms had gripped his body and begun slowly crushing it. The armor was too heavy and constricting; he shrugged it off and it fell into the road.

Someone’s hand touched his forehead gently. It was soft and cool on his sweaty skin and he made a noise he would have regretted if he hadn’t been too disoriented to know he’d made it.

_It’s okay. It’ll be okay. Welcome back, Erik Lehnsherr._

The voice in his head belonged to a teenage girl. It must have been the one Charles had called Jean. He’d only seen flashes of her in the fire; she’d been incandescent and he had been somewhere far away, but he’d felt her power like sunlight on his skin after an eternity of being cold.

“Magneto,” he gasped.

“No,” she said, full of that certainty that made telepaths unbearable. “Magneto was a bad dream. Now you’re awake.”

Erik gagged and spat, which while physically necessary also happened to be how he felt about her point. He wasn’t sure he wanted to be awake. The last time he’d felt truly awake had been the day he’d lost them in the forest, cradling the bodies of his wife and daughter in his arms and knowing he was alive only because he wanted so badly to be dead. After that time was like quicksand.  He must have taken the bodies back to the house because when he’d left for the factory they looked like they were sleeping peacefully in the bed he and Magda had shared. An empty bottle of whiskey that had been nearly full the night before had been on the kitchen table. He was missing nearly twelve hours and didn’t want them back, and everything after that—the factory, Auschwitz, the mansion, Cairo—was a blur of pain and power and the vague tickling sensation that he was missing something important. But nothing was important, because his daughter was dead.

Either being sick was making his eyes water or he was crying again. That didn’t seem to matter much either. He drifted for awhile, considered running again when they had piled out onto the crowded street outside Cairo International Airport, but then the fast kid with the broken leg had thrown an arm around his shoulder and Erik found himself being used as a human crutch as they went into the airport, past security without being stopped, and onto a plane whose first class seating was suddenly entirely empty.

“You’re the boy from the Pentagon,” Erik said at some point through his pounding headache. He had come to realize he was using the kid for support as much as vice versa, and that his usual aversion to physical contact with strangers must have been buried under exhaustion.

“Yeah, Quicksilver to the rescue,” the kid said, hissing with the pain from his broken leg. “Again. It’s all good. Not like I had plans or anything.”

“Thank you.” Erik didn’t know what else to say. He wasn’t even sure he meant his thanks sincerely. Two days ago he’d had a wife and daughter and enough love in his life that he was happy and more content than he’d ever believed possible; two hours ago he’d had the entire world literally bending to his will and enough power to fill the void left by their absence. Now he had neither and felt hollow, full of cavernous empty space held together only by a thin layer of skin stretched over brittle bones. He wanted to be sick again. He wanted to sleep for years and he wasn’t entirely sure he wanted to wake up.

Then they’d reached the end of the ramp where Hank was holding the door to the plane open as they all filed through while the real flight attendants stood obedient and unseeing off to the side. Erik waited to be turned away. To have the boy snatched from him and the door sealed in his face because he was never allowed to keep good things, he’d proved over and over that he couldn’t take care of them. But Hank just nodded and told them to find seats. Unthinkingly, Erik took the aisle seat across from where Charles lay stretched across an entire row with his head in Jean’s lap. Both their eyes were closed and she had her fingers on the temple that wasn’t caked with dried blood.

“He’ll be fine,” Raven said from the row in front of them. He could read her emotions better in her blond form and now saw that she was worried about something. Him?

Erik said nothing. He was still sweating unpleasantly but now he was shivering as well, cold in a way that had nothing to do with the steamy Egyptian air. He felt lightheaded and for a surreal moment wondered if it wasn’t just his head but his whole body and now that his connection to the earth’s magnetic fields had broken he’d just float away entirely. Hollow men couldn’t have much mass, could they? _Let’s find out,_ he heard himself say, on another plane with Charles and Hank and Raven a long time ago, and he closed his eyes and let himself drift up, away from the sound of Raven’s voice calling his name.

 

 

 


	2. Gardening (1)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Vivian asked for Erik gardening. This contains no _actual_ gardening but the next one will. Sorry!

“Leaving so soon, my friend?”

Charles did his best to sound calm and authoritative, but the truth was that the sight of Erik casually perusing the long line of antique cars in the mansion’s oversized garage made his stomach twist painfully. It didn’t help that he was wearing jeans and had his sleeves rolled up to his elbows, looking casual and at ease as he planned to run away yet again.

Then again, Erik had been full of surprises lately. At the end of the line of cars he tapped two fingers against the hood of a 1961 Oldsmobile hardtop that Charles had only kept from the scrap heap because the teenagers needed to learn to drive somehow and it was indestructible. The engine sputtered to life at his touch and Erik leaned against the side of the car, folded his arms. He didn’t seem in much of a hurry to go anywhere.

“Grounds need flowers,” he said.

Charles powered the wheelchair closer, wondering if he’d misheard or if that really had been an answer in Erik’s mind. “I’m sorry, the ground needs flowers?”

“It’s not a lawn if it’s miles long. You have a mansion with grounds and grounds need flowers. Flowers need seeds. I’m going into town to get some. May I borrow this car?”

“Yes, of course,” Charles said, almost automatically. “You didn’t need to ask. For anything in this house, I mean. It’s all yours too.”

“And am I allowed to ask if you’d like to come with me?”

“Oh,” Charles said. Immediately he berated himself for sounding so surprised. He was, but he could have hidden it better. He found himself thinking of Erik as something easily scared away, some kind of wounded predator that had to be tricked into accepting help. Perhaps that was just old habit; perhaps it was still true. Almost every day since they’d returned from Cairo, aside from the first few that he’d spent in some kind of withdrawal, Erik had spent the morning reconstructing the mansion with Jean and the afternoon in his room. He helped Hank in the lab when asked, nodded politely to teachers when he passed them in the halls. Sometimes there were new dishes in the fridge or cookies on the counter in the mornings with notes in his cramped handwriting for students to help themselves. But they saw little of him otherwise: he didn’t join them for meals, avoided common areas, had no interest in passing the warm summer afternoons outside with the others. Charles sensed that he had been in the library where they had played chess so often twenty years ago but had never managed to catch him there, though several times he’d found perfectly-steeped, still-warm cups of tea on his desk.

Then again, his thoughts were still easily muddled, more than two weeks after they’d all returned to the mansion, and he didn’t quite trust his own perception of events around him, so why not trust Erik’s instead? If Erik said they needed flowers, they probably did.

“Yes, that would be lovely,” he said. “A field trip, as it were.”

He blushed fiercely immediately after, wondering if he could possibly have sounded inaner. He had the unproven but unshakeable conviction that blushes spread not only from his cheeks to his ears but right up over every inch of his entirely exposed head these days.

“A field trip, then, if you like,” Erik agreed easily. “Though I’m hardly one of your students, and I don’t need supervision.”

“I didn’t mean to imply—”

“Relax, Charles.” Erik interrupted his stuttering with a casual wave that doubled as his powers gesturing the car forward into a position where Charles could better transfer into the passenger seat. There could have been the hint of a smile on his face as he slid into the driver’s seat after stowing the wheelchair in the trunk but that meant they were living in a world where Erik was capable of teasing and Charles wasn’t sure whether that made him want to laugh or cry. They hadn’t lived in that world since 1962. He also wasn’t sure whether he was allowed to tease back yet, or ever. Under his collared shirt Erik wore a gold necklace, a misshapen locket with the crumpled remains of pictures of his parents inside it. He’d done his best to separate the iron in the blood stains from the rest of it but the metal would never be as pure it had been when it had lain around his daughter’s neck instead. Sometimes Charles felt Erik’s regret about that emanating from his room down the hall.

The drive to town was silent. Charles waited for Erik to speak the way he’d been waiting for Erik to speak for weeks and still it didn’t happen, but it was a companionable silence and after a few miles Charles allowed himself to relax into it. The wind felt strange on his head. The skin there seemed more sensitive now in its bareness, in a way that was odd but not unpleasant and, he suspected, could have been very pleasant under the right circumstances.

He didn’t allow himself to think about those, though, no matter how many times his eyes drifted over to Erik’s profile without his permission. It was like a magnetic pull, his focus to Erik’s entire being, but magnetism was a natural law of the universe, wasn’t it, and there was no point fighting those. It didn’t mean anything. Erik was a grieving husband and father and respecting that was the only thing that meant anything at all now.

“I was thinking zinnias,” Erik said suddenly, without taking his eyes off the road. “Some hydrangea bushes, hibiscuses, a few plots of black-eyed Susans. Perennials, nothing that would require too much effort to maintain.”

“That’s probably for the best, yes. Most of the students couldn’t take care of a cactus,” Charles said.

“So a vegetable garden is out of the question, I suppose.”

“I have been meaning to hire a gardener…”

Erik clicked his tongue disapprovingly. “Water and weed them, that’s all. It’s hardly difficult, especially now that you have a girl who can make it rain with her mind.”

“She’s a mutant with extraordinary powers and a student at my school, not a human irrigation system.”

Erik took the turn onto the town’s main road and gave Charles an eloquently judgmental raised eyebrow, a clear reminder that he was much more familiar with what Ororo was and wasn’t. They were alike in ways that transcended how they’d met—tough children who’d fended for themselves, desperately wanting the family they didn’t have, preoccupied with justice and their powers and how to combine the two. Neither opened up easily. Then they had both been used by Apocalypse and defied him only at the last possible moment, saved by Mystique from committing even greater crimes against their own kind. They seemed to have an unspoken understanding of each other that had persisted past the battle; a few times Charles had seen them training together, Erik manipulating the electromagnetic fields in the lightning storms that Ororo conjured from nowhere, or cooking at strange hours or speaking in soft tones in the halls.

“Ask her for her help,” Erik said as he pulled into an empty parking spot outside the general store. “She’ll surprise you.”

“Most things surprise me these days,” Charles said. “It’s a novel sensation.”

Erik definitely smirked then. “Good for you, too. Come on, you could use some dianthus seeds as well.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I need all the ideas and am a tragically uncreative person myself so if you want me to write something, ask below or [on tumblr](http://waltwhitmaniac.tumblr.com) and I will write you that thing, k?


	3. Gardening (2)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The second half of Vivian's gardening prompt

Erik started planting the seeds around the East Wing, which had been outside the worst of the blast radius and as such was the only part of the mansion that still had identifiable flowerbeds. Ten years of long shifts at the factory had trained his body to wake up before the sun rose, and before that routine had been the only thing that kept him from losing his mind in his prison below the Pentagon. So it was comforting, in a way, to rise at 5 a.m., drink a solitary cup of coffee in the kitchen, and put in a few hours of work before the rest of the mansion came to life. He sacrificed a pair of jeans and a sleeveless shirt to the inevitable dirt and sweat stains that came with manual labor, taking them off to shower after and putting them on again the next morning like a uniform, like he’d done with his clothes at the factory. An outfit for work, an outfit for home, and a suit in the closet for special occasions, like when he’d take Magda into the city for their anniversary.

It was the same every morning. Clothes. Coffee. His supplies: a basket to carry the seed packets, a trowel, a garden hose trailing behind him by the metal in its spout like a helpful dog. No gloves or shoes—he liked feeling the grass between his toes and the dirt between his fingers. It reminded him of their backyard, even though their entire property could have fit into the mansion several times over.

But some things were universal—dew in the morning, the noise a trowel made when it broke ground, the bees that hovered in the cool air, buzzing at odd intervals like they were just remembering how. Sometimes they landed on his finger if he was patient, but never the way they’d flocked to Nina. He remembered the first time she brought him a fresh, dripping honeycomb with at least a hundred bees buzzing above her little head, how proudly she’d declared, “Papa, look what they showed me! It’s a present for you.”

The air was more humid today than it had been the day before. It would be stifling by noon, but this early he only noted it casually before he got to work. Before he’d bought the seeds he’d spent several mornings scrutinizing the flowerbeds, filling in the eventual patterns, textures and colors in his mind. The brightest flowers would go along the front of the house, where they would be seen by anyone coming up the driveway and make the mansion look welcoming. The ones that grew quickly and took up more space, like the hydrangea bushes, would go along the side underneath the classroom windows. Each group of seeds went in neat geometric rows so there would be no gaps in the eventual blooms; he wanted every inch to be colorful, vibrant, walls of flowers.

This morning he began with the zinnias on the northeast corner, which included the windows under Charles’s study. Zinnias first with small plots of lilac scattered among them, enough that with the right wind and open windows the smell would drift into the study in the spring. He found himself looking up at those windows frequently, for all that there was no chance Charles would be anywhere but his bed at 5 a.m, especially given the disapproving glares Hank sent him these days every time he tried to do anything more strenuous than make a cup of tea. Erik found it unsettling, agreeing with Hank.

He preferred not to think of it. He preferred not to think of anything during these quiet hours, passively accepting the sensory input of the task and trying not to think or feel or be anything apart from that. Not always successfully—sometimes he wiped the sweat from his face with his forearm and realized he was wiping away tears too. That happened easily and often these days; more than he knew, he suspected. Little things or nothing set him off. Children’s laughter echoing down the halls, the deer he saw on the mansion’s lawn in the early mornings, the necklace every time he looked in a mirror, which he made sure wasn’t often. It was having no time to grieve, he supposed. En Sabah Nur had found him before he’d had time to even begin processing his loss, fed his rage and despair until it was all he was, and then subsumed him so deep in the earth’s magnetic fields that it had felt like the sweetest kind of drowning. It was a miracle Raven had been able to break through to him at all. Only her…only Charles…

Well, now his body had apparently decided it was in mourning, regardless of the fact that his mind was still reeling. He didn’t mind so much. Didn’t mind anything, really. For the moment there was no fight left in him.

The tiny, curious voice came out of nowhere.

“What are you doing?”

The trowel he’d been guiding with his powers jerked to a stop in midair and flung dirt into his face. Erik blinked and sputtered, and by the time he could see and speak normally again there was a little girl standing only a few feet away.

“Planting flowers,” he said, rougher than he would have liked. She couldn’t have been older than six, wearing a hand-embroidered dress with pockets and a braid in her dark hair. Her eyes were big and she looked at him like he was an interesting unsolved puzzle that she was determined to figure out, a look he’d seen on Nina’s face so many times he’d lost count by her third birthday. On his knees in the dirt, they were the same height, and he pretended to cough so his voice wouldn’t crack.

“Oh,” the girl said. “But where are they?”

“Here.” He held up the packet of seeds, pointing to the colorful pictures of zinnias on the front. “They start small and then get bigger after they’ve been in the ground for a while. They’ll be all sorts of pretty colors by the spring.”

“That’s so long!” She looked disappointed, then her face lit up. “I could help? If you don’t mind?”

Erik nodded and held out the bag of the seeds and the trowel, but she laughed.

“No, I mean, my way. Like this.”

She crouched down next to him, screwed her face up in that same expression of intense focus, and then dug her fingers into the dirt like she was searching for the seeds he’d already planted. There was a moment of stillness before perfectly-formed mature zinnia flowers burst up between her fingertips, reaching their full height before they stopped and swayed in the warm breeze. The girl turned to him and grinned.

“See? Now you don’t have to wait so long.”

Erik nodded again, unable to look away from the flowers. He tried to think of something to say to her but his mind had gone blank of everything but his daughter’s face.

“Are you okay?” The girl’s grin faltered; she stood up again and backed away quickly, seeming to realize that she might have done something wrong. “I didn’t mean to—I was only trying—”

Her voice climbed as she got more anxious, which was the only thing that could have snapped it him out of that kind of trance. Erik wiped his eyes quickly and forced a smile, hoping it was more than a tight grimace that could well be more frightening than comforting.

“No, I’m fine. Thank you. You have a wonderful gift.” She still looked worried, so he sat down with his legs crossed so she would feel stronger by being taller. That had worked with Nina when she was this girl’s age, which wasn’t so very long ago. So had ruthless honesty; children seemed to have a sixth sense for it. “It’s only that someone very special to me, about your age, has—had—a gift like that. Nature listened to her too and did whatever she told it to. Only she could talk to animals, not plants. Her name was Nina. What’s yours?”

“Jessie,” she said. “And you’re Mr. Len-shur. The Professor’s friend.”

“Erik. That’s all.”

Jessie smiled again, placated even by his clumsy attempts to comfort her.

But it wasn’t enough. His own daughter was dead, he’d failed her, and nothing would ever be enough again.

“I could use more help, if you’re not busy,” he said, using the weight of his guilt to bury the part of himself that wanted to take his tools and run away from this child so like the one he couldn’t protect. Jessie nodded, trying to be solemn and grownup but unable to fully hide her enthusiasm, and got down next to him again to plunge her hands into the dirt, over and over until hundreds of zinnias in rows of purples, oranges, and pinks covered every inch of the flowerbed. Erik worked next to her, breaking the dirt with his hands while the trowel hovered beside him, out of her line of sight, twisting and warping in midair until it was an unrecognizable hunk of scrap metal.

 

 

 

 


	4. House Mom

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jubilee is NOT A MOM
> 
> (broad city y/y?)

The infirmary was blown to pieces, but thankfully no one really needed it. Jubilee had led some of the older students in resettling the young ones around the undamaged parts of the East Wing, organizing room-sharing and bunk-beds and mattresses on the floor not because there was no space but because the little ones didn’t want to be alone. They had nightmares and cried a lot, even when she gave them permission to play with their powers inside the house, which had always been strictly off-limits before. But what was a little more damage, if it kept them calm? And even she cried when two strange cars came up the drive and they discovered that everyone who left had come back alive.

Plus a few new faces. The boy who’d saved them was there. There was a girl with dark skin and a mohawk of white hair that Jubilee thought might be the coolest thing she’d ever seen. She spoke in an unfamiliar accent and seemed hesitant at first—not shy, but tentative, unsure of her welcome. She said her name was Ororo. Scott said she had been a bad guy at first but they couldn’t have stopped En Sabah Nur without her, and that her powers were awesome, especially how she could send lightning out of her fingertips in a way that reminded Jubilee a little of her own powers. It would be cool to have someone to train with, if Ororo wanted to stay and the Professor gave permission. She had tried to kill Scott and destroy the world, after all. But she seemed nice, if a little scary, and the way she followed Mystique around was pretty cute.

Then there was the man who slept next to the Professor.

Jubilee remembered the day Magneto had given his speech on the White House lawn. She had mimicked the way he gestured when he used his powers, only hers left showers of sparks trailing through the air like streamers on the Fourth of July—she had been too young to manage anything but harmless flashes of light then. But she had liked his flair for the dramatic, even if what he was talking about sounded insane. And the day everyone came home, she recognized the face under Magneto’s helmet on the unconscious man they brought in along with an equally unconscious Professor X.

Mr. McCoy put them in one of the empty bedrooms at first. It had two twin beds with a small bedside table in between. In the room next door, one of the kids with a small healing power was looking at Peter’s broken leg, which was sticking out at a nauseating angle, and Mystique was resting on a couch, grimacing every time she swallowed and speaking to Ororo in a raspy voice. Jubilee didn’t see much after that because she ran off with Scott, Jean, and Kurt to hear about everything that had happened and bemoan the fact that she’d been playing mommy to a bunch of kids for the longest twenty-four hours _ever_ while they were off having adventures.

But something drew her back to that room the next day. She wasn’t sure what she expected and so it didn’t make sense to be surprised, but she was—they were both still there, still sleeping, with their faces turned toward each other and identical furrows in their brows. Like they were both having the same troubling dream, or taking refuge from the same troubling reality. She stood in the space between the beds and looked back and forth between them, wondering what had happened to the Professor’s hair, wondering what Magneto was doing here at all. Scott said he had been a bad guy too, that all the destruction all over the world was because of him and his power over magnetic fields, but he had changed his mind like Ororo just when En Sabah Nur was about to grab the Professor. Scott had demonstrated with his fingers the giant X Magneto had made in the ground in front of the Professor, which Jubilee thought was a little cheesy, but she supposed that made Magneto a friend, or at least not an enemy.

Jean got a weird cagey look on her face when asked about Magneto, though, and wouldn’t say anything except to call him Erik Lehnsherr instead, so Jubilee moved on to more important questions as they ate lunch outside.

“So how come the Professor’s a cue ball now, huh?”

“It must have been part of the process to transfer En Sabah Nur’s consciousness into his body. He was bald too. Whatever body he inhabited must have taken on a vaguely similar physical appearance during the transfer,” Jean said. She finished her potato salad and stole Jubilee’s too; she’d been eating ravenously since they got home, like her burst of power had used up thousands of calories worth of energy that needed to be manually replenished. “I’m just glad Kurt got to the Professor before he turned all blue and ancient-looking and evil too.”

Jubilee nodded in agreement. “Blue is cool, the rest of it not so much. Especially with the Professor’s power.”

“Tell me about it,” Jean sighed.

“But he’s like, okay? He’s gonna wake up and all that?”

“Yeah, of course.” Jean looked over her shoulder at a brick wall, but Jubilee knew that if she could follow it that line of sight would lead through walls and doors and empty rooms directly to the Professor’s face. Jean seemed to know where and how he was at all times, somehow. “They had a telepathic showdown in his head. He nearly died, but now he just needs to rest his mind and remember he has a body too. It’s healing sleep. That amount of psychic energy…well, he did almost take over everyone in the whole world.”

“Until you saved the day,” Jubilee pointed out.

“Something like that,” Jean said, smiling shyly. She was still quiet and soft-spoken, but the bitter edge to her self-deprecating smiles was gone; Jubilee could tell she was proud of herself, and more comfortable with her powers. That made the loss of delicious potato salad sting a little less.

The man who slept beside the Professor was awake the next time Jubilee passed the bedroom door, which was left open in case either of them called out. She looked inside without registering what she was seeing, kept walking, then doubled back just as he threw off the covers and tried to stand up. Neither activity went well. One leg became tangled in the blankets and he lost his balance, sat down again with such force the mattress bounced even though he couldn’t have weighed all that much. In fact, he looked almost too skinny without all the armor on. Out in the hallway, Jubilee could hear his harsh panting breaths as she vacillated between running for a grownup and her own curiosity. She watched as he carefully unwound the blanket from his trapped foot, moving gingerly like he was nauseous or in pain or, for all she knew, both. He had only just begun to examine his surroundings when his gaze fell on the other bed.

“Charles,” she heard him gasp.

Now it was run for an adult or let him fall on his face, and he looked like he’d been through enough.

“Hey, chill out,” she said, rushing into the room and reaching his side just before he tried to stagger over to the Professor. The lightest touch of her hand on his shoulder pushed him back on the bed, but he barely glanced at her before trying again.

“Charles—”

“Hey!” she insisted. This time she positioned herself in front of him squarely, remembered what Jean had said. “Mr. Lehnsherr. Erik. You need to like, calm down, okay, or you’re going to upset the Professor.”

It worked: he stopped flailing and looked at her face for the first time, eyes wide and questioning. His ginger hair stuck out at all angles and he was somewhere between needing a shave and the beginnings of a beard. He was pretty foxy, Jubilee thought—they never mentioned _that_ in the classes about Magneto. That helmet really had been a shame.

“Who are you?” he said, confused.

“Jubilee. I go to school here.”

“School—we’re at Charles’s school? I thought we—” He trailed off a little, perhaps unwilling to say _blew it up_ out loud.

“You did,” she interrupted. “Just not all of it. Perks of going to school in a mansion—though without classrooms it’s basically just a hotel, I guess.” She shrugged, smirked a little. “This is your room, we hope you enjoy your stay.”

She suspected her attempt to put him at ease went right over his head; his eyes had a weird glazed look and kept going to the Professor like they were magnetized there.

“What’s the matter with him?” he said. “Charles, is he—is he hurt?”

“Jean says he needs to remember he has a body. It’s good sleep. Recharging psychic energy, or something. And she’s eating everything, so I guess everyone heals up different.”

Erik nodded like that made sense, even though Jubilee wasn’t entirely sure it did. He seemed to have expended all his own energy on waking up and worrying for two minutes, and she thought of all the bridges that had been torn apart and the Sydney Opera House imploding on live TV and the ocean floors rising because he told them to and wondered that he’d managed to force himself awake at all.

“I need—” he began, and then broke off like he couldn’t remember or decide what he needed after all. His eyes were shiny and all reservations Jubilee had had about him maybe hurting the Professor dissipated as he utterly failed to notice that he’d started crying. This wasn’t a bad guy—or if he was, he was too sad to be bad right now.

“Okay,” she said. “Okay, look. I’ll show you.”

She offered her arm and braced herself as he used it to lever himself upright; his legs were unsteady and she could feel a slight tremble running through his whole body. This close she could feel an unhealthy heat radiating from his skin, like he was feverish. Maybe he was—maybe that was how he had to heal, she thought as she guided him the three steps from his bed to the Professor’s and helped him sit down so he wouldn’t fall over and crack his head on the floor.

“See?” she said, stepping away to give them space. “He’s fine. He’ll be fine.”

She couldn’t see his face like this, but she saw the shaking fingers he lifted to the burns on the Professor’s temples, the tenderness with which he touched the damaged skin. And she felt weirdly creepy, like this wasn’t something she was supposed to be seeing.

“Um, I’m just going to get—someone,” she said, already backing toward the door. Thankfully she cut herself off before she said “an adult,” because that made her sound like a kid and she’d been pretty damn grownup herself, looking after everyone after the mansion blew up and the soldiers came. There was a little of that house mom feeling left in her as she looked back over her shoulder and saw Erik’s shoulders slump, his entire body tilt forward slowly until his forehead was resting on the Professor’s sternum.

Still, she’d much rather be an X-Man.


	5. Good Parenting (1)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Evarria asked: how Erik finds out about Peter?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay I may do a super srs bsns version of this one day, but I care about two things in life: 1. Raven and Erik being bros and 2. Raven being a snarky badass. Sorry, sulky movie!Raven. I do not accept you.
> 
> Plus Ororo tells Peter that Raven told her which leads me to assume Raven is not all that great at keeping secrets.

Raven recovered first, then Erik, then Charles.

Erik recuperated slowly, shaking off En Sabah Nur’s influence a little more every day. As that waned, his understanding of the magnitude of his loss, the repercussions of what he had done or been made to do, increased until he was rendered mostly useless by a combination of guilt and grief. Raven spent all the time she could spare from planning to rebuild the mansion with him, gently bullying him into eating, showering, and taking walks around the grounds. He didn’t like leaving his room, especially now that Charles was waking up for a few minutes more every day, but Raven was persistent and after a few days could even manage to get him to spend a few hours in the library in the evening, reading or talking. They had ten years to catch up on, and Paris was a long time ago.

When all that failed, she got them both drunk.

Somewhere between tipsy and trashed, Erik relaxed. He opened up, smiled, even laughed every so often. He told her stories about his wife and daughter, his wanderings after Washington, and reminisced about the few months of good work they had done in the Brotherhood. As for Raven—

Raven got chatty when she was drunk.

“Teenagers are _terrifying,_ ” she moaned, sprawled the length of the couch with her feet dangling over the side. “They’re all ‘teach me’ and ‘guide me’ and ‘oh Mystique you’re my hero.’ Have they _met_ me?”

“You’re not exactly a…people person,” Erik admitted. He was toward the end of his second glass of scotch, at that perfect sweet spot of drunkenness where he remembered the good things as well as the bad ones.

“I’d be a people person if people could _keep up,_ ” Raven said. “Or if they did everything I told them to and didn’t attempt independent thinking.”

“Because they’re always wrong.”

“Because they’re always wrong! Yes. Exactly. _You_ get it. Like that time in San Francisco when Riptide said he could use his powers in conjunction with a coming storm to hold back the guards while we got that guy out of Alcatraz. No need for another escape route, we could walk right out the front door. Only there _was_ no storm and we _definitely_ needed another escape route. Because…”

“He was wrong,” Erik finished obediently.

Raven aimed congratulatory finger guns at him. “Pow pow.”

He laughed a little and tipped his glass back to empty it, then set it down on a nearby table with a force that betrayed he was a little more inebriated than he looked. That and the almost comical look of surprise on his face when the air rippled with a soft whooshing sound and Peter was suddenly standing there, arms crossed and smacking gum loudly. Erik’s poker face tended to desert him when he was drunk, which Raven found hilarious.

She found certain habits of Peter’s much less hilarious.

“Hey, Peter, what’s X-Men rule number one?”

Peter heaved a beleaguered sigh. “Are you sure you want to make ‘no chewing gum’ the _first_ rule? It seems like a wasted opportunity to say something really badass. No mutant left behind, or something.”

Raven propped herself up on one elbow and twisted her neck until she could scowl at him properly. “Hey! I make the rules and you follow them, or I punish you for insubordination by making you run laps. _At normal speed._ ”

“Fine, _fine._ ” Peter vanished, there was the brief ping of something being spat into the metal trashcan in the corner, and then he was back. “I’d rather not die of boredom, thanks. What are you guys up to?”

“None of your business,” Raven said, because Erik was busy pouring himself another drink and looking contemplative; she doubted he’d even heard the question. And the real answer— “therapy by way of alcohol abuse”—seemed a little indelicate. “Go pester Hank now. Or literally anyone else.”

Peter made a face at her, shrugged and disappeared again. He reminded her of Sean—almost aggressively easygoing and, as she’d discovered over the last few days, capable of taking and returning levels of teasing and sarcasm that would have made the younger kids cry. He needed discipline but he’d taken to training well so far, and she definitely liked him better than Scott, who popped all his collars and used being a tool as a defense mechanism. Though she supposed she was predisposed to like Peter because she liked his father.

“He’s the kid who broke me out of the Pentagon ten years ago,” that father said, oblivious. “What’s he doing here? Does Charles have him on a mission-by-mission retainer?”

“He came to us this time, actually,” Raven said. She held out her glass across the empty space between them and Erik poured generously, only spilling a little on the fancy Persian rug that had almost certainly seen worse when Charles’s mother spent most of her time in this room. “Wanted to talk to Charles, made it just in time to get us all out of the house.”

“Isn’t he a little old to be a student?” Erik said, but he looked impressed.

“Now what would Charles say to that?”

“That the Xavier Institute is open to all who need it, regardless of age or circumstance,” Erik intoned sarcastically, imitating Charles’s most holier-than-thou accent. Raven must have been drunker than she thought, because she snorted with laughter and then collapsed into giggles so bad that she had to bury her face in the sofa cushion to muffle them. Erik allowed himself a few wheezing huffs of amusement, and the soft smile on his face lingered even when they’d both calmed down and she had dragged herself into something resembling a sitting position again. Staying upright was slightly more difficult than expected, so she propped her head on her palm. It helped Erik’s face stay relatively stationary.

“You should get to know him,” she said.

Erik looked confused. “Who?”

“Peter, the kid who was just here?”

“Oh. Why would I do that?”

“Because you’re—” Raven stopped herself from answering with the truth just in time “—a strong male role model. Which he needs.”

Erik’s laughter had a bitter edge this time. “Try again, Mystique.”

“I’m serious, Erik,” she said, resisting the urge to do something maudlin like hug him or get weepy at the self-hatred that formed the basis of his bitterness. He was so deeply convinced that he had all but killed his wife and child himself, by virtue of Magneto simply existing, and the self-recrimination shone through even when his was describing their happiest moments. Like he was the one who’d loosed that arrow, not those Soviet shitheads. Raven blinked until the two Eriks in front of her became one again and said with uncharacteristic gentleness, because this _mattered,_ “What happened to your family wasn’t your fault. You were a great dad to Nina, and you will be to Peter too, I promise.”

“ _What?_ ” Erik rasped, after he stopped choking on his drink.

Raven rewound the conversation, then flopped back on the couch bonelessly. “Oh, shit.”


	6. Good Parenting (2)

“You’re drunk. You don’t know what you’re saying,” Erik said. He sounded like he was trying to convince himself of those facts.

“No shit,” Raven mumbled from where she’d buried her head in her hands. The words were muffled by her fingers and the blond curls that had sprung up when she’d defaulted to her favorite human form in embarrassment. Like hiding her real face would hide her slip of the tongue. There was also a cowardly part of her that couldn’t bear to look at Erik’s face as he processed that he had a living child as well as a dead one. His voice shook; that was bad enough.

“Peter—the Peter who just left? No. That’s not possible.”

Panic had sobered her up like a bucket of ice to the face. Unfortunately, it hadn’t gifted her with a sense of tact that she’d never had in the first place and certainly hadn’t developed after ten years of working alone.

“Think harder, Erik. Twenty-five years ago. Last name Maximoff.”

Now Erik looked like he’d taken a bucket of ice to the face too. He swore quietly in Polish and ran his hands through his hair. Slowly he said, “Twenty-five years ago I came to Washington looking for a man who’d been hired by the US government after the war. He’d vanished. I took it badly—there was a fight in a bar in Georgetown. A woman peeled me off the sidewalk afterwards and took me home with her. I only stayed for a week.”

“Yeah, well,” Raven said. “A week was long enough.”

Erik shifted like he was about to stand up then sank back again, unwilling to test the steadiness of his legs. Raven watched him visibly master the urge to pour another drink, perhaps figuring it was that kind of decision-making that had led to this situation in the first place. Selfishly she was grateful that at least he was too stupefied to have the kind of reaction she’d been dreading. No tears yet, though he had that talent for crying silently and with no change in expression that had made for more than one awkward interruption in what she’d thought a normal conversation.

“Does he know?” Erik asked.

Raven nodded.

“He hasn’t said anything. In Cairo, in Washington—”

“He didn’t know in Washington,” Raven said quickly, to take that expression off Erik’s face at the thought that his son had avoided him for over ten years. “He only found out recently, that’s why he came to the mansion in the first place. He was looking for you. Only missed you by a few minutes, as it turned out.”

“In Cairo he said he was there for his family.”

Raven scoffed. “Yeah, that wasn’t just a metaphor.”

“But why didn’t he _say—_ ”

“Because he’s a smart kid, Erik! He’d thought about that moment. He didn’t want the fate of the whole world on the line when it happened. And he didn’t want you to stop for him, he wanted you to stop because you’re the kind of person who creates rather than destroys. And because if you _had_ stopped for him it wouldn’t have been him at all—it would have been some _idea_ of him you had, this magical son who made life worth living again. If you’re going to be in his life, Peter wants it to be real—the real you, the real him.”

Erik exhaled shakily. Raven wasn’t surprised to see tear tracks on his cheeks now.

“He told you all this?”

“He didn’t tell me a thing. Only that he knew about you.” She shrugged. “I’m good at reading people.”

“Are we quite certain Charles is the only telepath in the family?” Erik said. It was a weak attempt at humor but a sincere one. He was gradually moving from shellshocked to a subtler bewilderment as he tried to fit a new jagged piece into the puzzle his life had been already, and when Raven scooted over on the couch and beckoned he went, a little lost and a little sad. She almost dared to put a comforting arm around his shoulder but neither of them were drunk enough or young enough for that anymore and Erik still managed to be forbidding even when he was reluctantly accepting help. They sat quietly for a moment side by side, and then he looked at her and spoke very quietly, like a confession.

“Raven, I know I’m a father. But my child is dead.”

She nodded.

“I can’t—I won’t—”

He broke off, closed his eyes and thought of Nina, how he’d always looped the scarves Magda knitted for her around her neck before she went out to play with her friends in the snow, how she’d held his hand while she introduced him to every rabbit in the den in the backyard, how they’d gradually cut venison and chicken and rabbit out of their diets after Nina got old enough to realize what she was eating and had burst into tears at the dinner table one day. She had informed every facet of his life, his little girl, and he hoarded his memories of her like precious stones. The day she was born, the day she said her first word, took her first step, the day her mutation manifested and every one of her eight birthdays. He knew nothing about Peter. So consumed with crisis and Charles the two times they had met, he’d barely even registered the boy, except to curse the nausea his powers had caused. He wondered if perhaps parents only had so much love to give, and he’d given Nina all of his forever, all at once, the moment he’d first laid eyes on her.

“If it helps,” Raven said when Erik faltered, “Peter doesn’t want to be Nina’s replacement any more than you want her to be replaced. It wouldn’t be fair to any of the three of you. He just wants to get to know you.”

“I’m going to disappoint him,” Erik said with a bitter smile.

Raven shrugged. “Well, you impressed the hell out of him in Cairo, so you’ve got some goodwill to burn through before that. Which you’ll do in record time, I’m sure.”

“I’ll—talk to him, then. Tomorrow, once—”

“Oh, no,” Raven interrupted, bolting upright. All the nervous energy that had drained out of her as his reaction had remained relatively calm rushed back in an instant. Her eyes went wide and her posture stiffened and for a moment Erik was genuinely concerned she was going to grab his hands pleadingly. He relaxed only a little when she held back. “No, do not throw me under the bus here, Erik. He wanted to tell you himself and if he finds out I spilled the beans he’s going to be even more of a pain in the ass than he is already. Like, disappointed and _sad,_ that kind of thing. I can’t handle it. You have to act like you don’t know.”

“You want me to pretend I haven’t just found out my son both exists _and_ is living under the same roof as I am?” Erik echoed incredulously.

“And act surprised when he tells you.”

“That’s absurd.”

“No more than any of this, really,” Raven pointed out, with rather unassailable logic. “But if he could keep quiet about it at the _end of the world_ because he wanted the moment when he told you to be right, you can keep quiet long enough to let him have it, right?”

“I get the sense you’ll only accept one answer to that question,” Erik said.

Raven laughed a little and aimed finger guns at him again.

“Pow pow,” she said wryly.

She was already dreading tomorrow’s hangover.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Don't worry, there will be a part 3 where Erik and Peter actually interact, much to the bemusement of them both/everyone around them :)


	7. Secrets

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Finally, Charles.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For hah3, who asked about Charles and Jean.

Jean felt a surge of pity more eloquent than words when the memory played out in their shared dream.

“Jean, this must stay between us,” Charles said swiftly. “Erik can never know. It was a moment of weakness but he’ll—he’ll take it hard. Nor Kurt.”

Charles still walked in his dreams, though it had been decades since he’d lost the use of his legs. Less surprisingly he still had hair in his dreams; that loss was only a few days old. His body was in one of the undamaged rooms on the ground floor, in a state somewhere between a deep meditative trance and a coma, but his mind had responded when Jean had inadvertently reached out for him in her sleep and now they were sitting at a perfect telepathic recreation of the kitchen table that no longer existed. It had been blown to pieces with a good portion of the rest of the mansion. But with the combined force of their telepathy, nothing had changed at all. Except that Jean now knew that for a moment, on that slab, Charles had felt his legs. The damage to his spinal cord would have been healed by the regenerative powers of the last mutant to house En Sabah Nur if the transference had continued for just a few more seconds. If Kurt had been distracted by Angel just a little longer. And in that moment Charles had relaxed, given way before the will of a stronger being, and forgotten to fight.

“Why not tell Erik? It wasn’t his fault. He shouldn’t feel guilty,” Jean said. Her telekinesis was operating almost unconsciously, lifting the teapot and mugs from the counter and floating them to the table, pouring tea steeped exactly the way Charles liked it. Another advantage of telepathy—the details were so malleable.

“Erik has an unfortunate tendency to harbor guilt over many things that are not his fault,” Charles explained. “His wife and daughter, for instance. I won’t be another of them. If he ever asks, I don’t remember much of what happened. Memory erasure in the face of psychic trauma, or some such. Can you do that for me?”

“Of course, Professor,” Jean said. She wasn’t young enough to feel special that she’d been taken into her teacher’s confidence, but the telepathic connection between them created a kind of intimacy that transcended concepts like the traditional teacher-student relationship. She understood him on a level no one else did, not even Erik or his own sister, and their agreement was less a promise and more a pact between souls. It sounded silly when put into words. She sent a pulse of understanding into his mind instead.

Charles smiled, a little wanly. “Thank you, my dear. It’s…good, to have you by my side.”

“Do you think you’ll be ready to wake up soon?”

The smile faltered. “Perhaps tomorrow…”

“Professor, you don’t even know what day it is,” Jean said, a reprimand that should have sounded ridiculous from a girl her age but didn’t because, after all, they were equals here—even oddly ageless, both of them. “You’re in a place where time doesn’t mean a thing. How are you going to know when it’s tomorrow?”

“I assume you’ll remind me, going by your reaction,” Charles said dryly. “Am I really so essential? Raven and Hank are handling the repairs admirably, from what I’ve seen. The children are safe. We saved the world, didn’t we?”

“No one’s going to begrudge you time to recover, you know. You don’t even have to leave your room. But they’d worry less, if you were awake. Your control would improve too—right now you’re aimless, floating, the way you have been since he got in your head.”

Charles sent her reluctant acknowledgment; he was well aware that he’d come a little—well, “unmoored” sounded better than “unhinged,” though the truth was probably somewhere in the middle, since En Sabah Nur had taken control of him through Erik and Cerebro. He’d somehow been trapped in his head and thrown out of it at the same time, and since they’d all returned to the mansion his telepathy had remained curled up like a wounded animal in his head for half the time and spent the other half drifting between the minds of everyone else in the mansion. Mostly while they were asleep—it was easier to slip into dreams than waking thoughts. That was how he was able to speak with Jean now and how he knew where Raven and Hank were in the repairs: they dreamed of mundanities now, ordering vast quantities of wood and stone, arranging activities for the children, training programs in Raven’s case and rebuilding his lab in Hank’s. Charles skimmed the surface of their minds, never intruding enough for them to notice yet just enough to send them waves of calm if their dreams took dark turns. He did the same for all of them except Erik, who was so exhausted on every level that he rarely dreamed at all.

He wasn’t at all surprised when that was Jean’s next point of attack.

“He spends half the day staring at you. In his mind he’s guarding you, atoning for when he let you down, and he’ll never forgive himself unless you forgive him first. Right now his mind is the most tortured I’ve ever seen. He just feels _so_ _much._ ”

“Indifference was never one of Erik’s flaws,” Charles said. “Though he certainly had enough others.”

Jean gave him a skeptical look he suspected she’d picked up from him. “You loved him anyway, didn’t you?”

Charles pulled away a little, physically and mentally. This was dangerous territory for him and by extension for Jean. Even at his most stable he never quite knew how to define his feelings about Erik, and right now the task was impossible. He only knew that “love” was entirely inadequate.

“He needs you,” Jean said, soothing. “You’re overthinking the rest. That’s the only thing that matters.”

“I don’t disagree,” Charles said. He considered for a moment. Somehow it seemed important to say the next part out loud, speak it in words instead of sharing the essence of the thought between their minds. Perhaps it wasn’t about articulating the thought to her at all, but to himself. It certainly wasn’t about Erik. “Jean, in Cairo your power protected you from _his_ influence. I’d weakened him as best I could but my power was already depleted and I had nothing left with which to defend myself. He was everywhere. My mind, my body, my heart—it was all his. Sometimes I don’t entirely believe he’s gone, I think he’s waiting for me, out there in the waking world. If any of his compulsion remains inside me—”

Before Cairo Jean would have said something placating, to indicate trust and reassure Charles that he would never hurt anyone, he was a good person. Now she knew that hardly mattered—sometimes things happened no matter what kind of person you were and the only thing you could control was what you did after. Instead of taking refuge in banalities, she made another promise.

“If any of his compulsion remains inside you, I’ll stop you. I’m stronger now. I know I could do it and I won’t hesitate, if that makes you feel better.”

“It does, actually,” Charles said. He smiled ruefully and reached across the table, laying his hand over her much smaller one. So much power in such an unassuming physical form. The same was true of him, he supposed. The bald, wheelchair-bound Professor X was hardly an imposing figure. But they were still here, still strong, and En Sabah Nur for all his frightening appearance had been nothing at all by the end.

“It’s almost morning. I have to wake up now, Professor,” Jean said.

“Yes,” Charles said. “I think I do too.”

And he opened his eyes in the spare room on the first floor to a hoarse voice whispering his name. His skull felt laden with rocks that ground and shifted when he tried to turn his head on the pillow but he persisted in moving despite the pain. It was worth it, to see that familiar face. Even though it was early morning Erik still lay on top of the blankets like he’d fallen asleep by accident, hair rumpled, jaw stubbled, the natural beauty of his eyes obscured by bags and redness. He was wearing clothes Charles vaguely recognized as belonging to Hank. He watched Charles without blinking, like he might disappear otherwise.

“Come here,” Charles said, stretching his hand into the space between their beds. “You can watch over me better.”

Without the slightest change in expression Erik sat up and took the two steps necessary to cross the room and take Charles’s hand. Charles tugged gently and Erik went, settling at his back and wrapping an arm around his waist. Even if he couldn’t feel them, Charles could picture the long legs tucked in behind his as Erik wrapped around him like a punctuation mark. The bones in the wrist pressed against his stomach felt too close to the skin, fragile and oddly birdlike for a grown man.

“Don’t say a word,” Erik whispered into his neck.

Charles closed his eyes and remained silent, letting them both keep their secrets for as long as they could.


	8. Truths

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Charles and Erik have a serious chat about things Erik did as a Horseman.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hah3 wanted reference to bald!Charles. LadySilvertongue wanted angst. I wanted an explanation for why the hell Erik would destroy Auschwitz. This chap attempts to hit all three.
> 
> If Holocaust stuff is triggery, stop at/around "Will you tell me?"

“You look like hell,” Charles whispered into the slight space between them.

Erik had been awake for a while already, though he hadn’t yet opened his eyes. He seemed content to simply lie there, breathing the same air, with one arm draped over Charles’s hip and his hand resting right over the line on his back where sensation vanished and paralysis set in. Charles wondered if Erik’s fingers had sought out the scar from the bullet on purpose, by instinct, or by accident. His soft breaths sometimes whistled on the exhale and his muscles were so lax it would have been easy to think him asleep. But Charles sensed the slow churning of his thoughts and knew better.

“And you’re bald,” Erik mumbled back.

Charles sighed wistfully. A week on and he was still not entirely sanguine about that fact.

“Maybe it will grow back.”

Erik peeled his eyes open long enough to take in the now-smooth terrain of Charles’s scalp, then closed them again to pronounce his sentence. “I wouldn’t get my hopes up.”

“Well, mine was true too. You do look like hell.”

“I don’t doubt it,” Erik said, reluctantly resigned to hearing Charles’s latest litany of concerns about him. The first morning they’d woken up together Charles had rolled over, taken one look at his face, and asked when he’d last eaten something. Erik, who hadn’t had an appetite since Poland and did in fact have to be goaded or tricked by Raven into eating most days, had managed a watery smile because it was so very Charles to have his first words since Cairo be those of a mother hen. And Erik’s had been telling him to shut up, which was equally predictable, he supposed.

They hadn’t seen much of each other since then. Charles still spent long stretches of every day asleep and Raven’s goading and trickery included walks and conversations as well as meals. Erik wasn’t always there when he woke, though sometimes notes in his handwriting rested on the trays of food Charles found on the bedside table, or sometimes Erik was asleep himself, laid out on the other bed still clothed or in Charles’s bed wearing pajamas that weren’t his. They hadn’t spoken of what had happened or anything that really mattered. Surface things were safest; always had been with them. There was darkness under the surface, indistinct and dangerous. Instead Erik brought him updates on the students, the mansion, the world outside their bedroom, and Charles alternated between telling Erik to take better care of himself and agonizing over his own baldness.

“What was that old adage—pride goeth before a fall, something like that?” he mused one of the first mornings.

“If it helps, you have a very finely-shaped skull,” Erik had informed him dryly. He had been patient at first, perhaps from a guilty conscience since technically Charles’s current follicle-challenged state was partly his fault, perhaps concerned that the baldness was a physical manifestation of massive psychological trauma from the battle. But once Charles had made it clear that his concerns were primarily aesthetic, Erik’s sympathy had subsided into something closer to fond mockery.

“ _And_ you need a better razor,” Charles said, when he’d finished informing Erik that there were still functioning showers and shampoo in the mansion and he’d better use both soon. Tiny cuts were scattered along the right curve of his jaw, more obvious for the drops of blood that had beaded on top of them. Charles pointed at the marks, not quite daring to touch. His sense of boundaries both physical and psychic was still shaky with regard to everyone—he kept slipping into unconscious minds, especially when he was on the border between sleep and wakefulness himself—but with Erik it was more complicated still. He’d just lost his wife and child, Charles reminded himself whenever he felt the gut instinct to reach out, and instead forced himself to be receptive to but not initiate physical contact.

“It’s not the razor,” Erik said. He still hadn’t moved his hand from Charles’s back. “It’s me. My powers are still…my fine control isn’t quite back. I could throw a car the length of this mansion without thinking but metal the size of my little finger escapes me. It’s absurd.”

“It’s expected. We’re all oversensitive. And please don’t do that, with the car.”

“Well, no one’s given me reason to. Yet.”

It was almost a joke. Charles responded without thinking.

“Your self-control is admirable.”

He knew at once they’d fallen into the darkness beneath the surface because he was close enough to see Erik’s lips whiten around the edges and all the muscles in his face tighten. His eyes filled instantly, as if the tears had simply been waiting for the right trigger that Charles had pulled with his usual unerring ability to say the wrong thing. He knew his own expression was probably one of horror but Erik was staring over his shoulder, not at his face, like he was seeing something long ago or far away.

“It wasn’t before, when I was with him,” Erik said. “My control, it was gone, I couldn’t stop myself, or didn’t want to stop myself—I can’t remember—but I did something awful, Charles. I thought perhaps it was a nightmare but I’ve seen it on the news, read it in the papers.”

“Will you tell me?” Charles kept calm, sensing Erik’s control was stretched now too. This was no longer a normal conversation but a desperate confession.

“He found me in the factory where I worked,” Erik said distantly. His voice was flat and he stared unblinking into thin air. “I was going to kill the men who had told the police about me. We would have been safe if—but he came and killed them before I could. I was numb, I had nowhere to go, I still needed to make someone to pay and he was offering the whole world. I remember thinking even that might not be enough.” He looked at Charles, pleading with him to understand, then away again. There was something on his face, almost unrecognizable for its rareness. Shame. “And the first place he took me was the camp where my powers came to me. Where my parents died. Where I met Schmidt. My life ended there, in all the ways that mattered. I said…something. I thought of running, attacking him, begging him to take us away from there, screaming until my voice was gone. But I couldn’t move.”

His voice was hoarse by then, as if he had been screaming. Faltering and awkward as it was, it was still more than Charles had ever heard him say at once in the entire time they’d known each other. Erik reluctant to come to the worst of it, he suspected.

“He showed me how to find the metal in the earth and it was…like when you showed me how to turn the satellite, but so much stronger. I was nothing beside it—a conduit at best—and I welcomed it. There was no room for grief or rage or doubt when everything I was, and all the empty spaces, was filled with this new awareness. It was like drowning or suffocating so slowly you never notice you’re in danger. It overwhelmed me and I—I—”

Erik broke off, shook his head. Newspaper headlines he had never seen flashed in front of Charles’s eyes, so sharp and sudden he knew they were a projection.

_Auschwitz Destroyed in Apocalyptic Attack._

_Former Concentration Camp No More._

_Holocaust Museum and Memorial Grounds Decimated._

With the visual memories came echoes of the emotions Erik had felt as he’d read, understood, and forced himself to remember what he’d done. A visceral sickness at first, with nausea so severe he’d almost run for the sink; horror and regret that overcame even the grief for Nina and Magda that he carried with him every moment; guilt and self-loathing that even more of his people’s history had been erased. And not by humans—he’d done it, after swearing _never again._ He hadn’t meant to, had been so captivated by the metal and lost in himself and En Sabah Nur’s promises that he could have been anywhere in the world, but intent hardly mattered. What mattered was that he’d buried his parents twice.

“Oh, my dear,” Charles said gently. There were tears on his face too now. He forgot his vow not to touch and rested his hand against Erik’s cheek. “It wasn’t your fault. He brought you there knowing what it would do to you.”

Erik was past bitter laughter, at the point of despair when even the idea of comfort was a curiosity. “What does that matter? They’re gone, again. My people—we’ve lost so much. Memory isn’t enough, we need places to go and things we can look at to remind us when we start to become complacent. Now there’s nothing there. The atrocities, the scope of the loss, the entire families killed—they’ll be forgotten so easily. They always are, when people want to forget.”

“You won’t let them,” Charles said. “Neither will I. That’s all we’ve ever been able to guarantee, Erik.”

He saw the hint of gold visible at Erik’s neckline and dared to pull the locket—or the mangled remains of it—free from where it lay under his shirt. Erik’s hand closed over it and snatched it back, immediate and instinctual.

“Your children too?” he said, looking down at the locket. A different kind of plea this time. “I did a poor job with Nina. I thought when she was older—I thought we had more time.”

“My children too. I’ll teach them if you won’t,” Charles promised. It was further than he’d pressed before on the subject of Erik staying at the mansion; that was another of those things they didn’t talk about.

Until they did, he supposed.

“Thank you,” Erik whispered. His eyes were swollen and shining but no new tears had fallen. Hope was still unimaginable but there was more exhaustion than despair in his body now, and something of the weight on his shoulders seemed to have lifted. Acknowledgment of a painful truth wasn’t the same as healing, but with time and care Charles hoped one might lead to the other. “I’d been wanting to tell you. And thank you for not telling me that humans won’t forget because they’re good. For listening and not lying.”

Charles nodded. Ten years ago he could have picked half a dozen fights based on those last two sentences alone but he didn’t want to now. He didn’t want to sleep anymore either. He wanted as much time and as many words as Erik would give him; in return he wanted to give Erik the kindness, and perhaps one day the happiness, that the world had withheld from him for most of his life. It wouldn’t be easy—things with Erik never were—but if this conversation was any indication, perhaps they could deal with the darkness under the surface together after all.


	9. Good Parenting (3)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The conclusion to Evarria's request re: Peter and Erik.

“What on earth are they doing?” Ororo whispered.

“Their best, I’m sure,” Raven said. She didn’t sound terribly optimistic about what results that might entail. Sprawled in an antique armchair leafing through an issue of _Vogue_ she’d picked up in town and sporadically shifting into the actresses and models on the pages, she didn’t seem nearly as entranced as Ororo in the scene playing out in the kitchen.

Then again, Ororo wasn’t the one who’d had to soothe Erik through several more surprise kid-related meltdowns over the past few days. He wanted to cling to Peter as his child almost as much as he wanted to push him away for not being Nina. He wanted to keep him close to protect him and at the same time keep his distance for Peter’s own safety. In his own mind and often in reality Erik had a target on his back, and bad aim was a theme in his life. The kind that resulted in irreparable collateral damage.

That kind of ambivalence was bound to manifest…strangely.

“He avoided Peter all day yesterday, now he’s teaching him to cook?”

“Sounds about right,” Raven said. “Is he doing that thing where he uses his powers to chop half a dozen things at once? He always pulls that one out when he’s trying to impress someone.”

Ororo leaned a little further into the long hallway between the sitting room and kitchen. She couldn’t see Peter or Erik, only hear the murmur of their voices, but there were three knives in lightning-fast motion above multiple cutting boards. Onions, parsley, tomatoes, maybe? They were indistinct at this distance.

“Yes.” She turned around, folded her arms, frowned in that way Raven knew meant confusion. “I thought Magneto was a mighty fighter, like you. It is strange to see him struggle with such a simple thing.”

“What, waiting for Peter to tell him he’s his father?”

“No, getting to know someone. Spending time with a stranger until they’re a friend.”

Raven burst into a loud, genuine peal of laughter that ended with an undignified but gleeful snort. “Erik doesn’t know how to make friends. He barely knows how to gain allies. He dislikes people on principle. Being friends with him is like trying to stay on one of those mechanical bulls you see at country fairs.”

“Mechanical what where?” Ororo said curiously.

It was almost a relief: at least one American product hadn’t been exported into a burgeoning global economy with new markets even in countries with communist or authoritarian regimes. Sometimes Raven felt like the trappings of an oblivious consumer culture had spread to every corner of the world. When she arrived in Berlin or Warsaw or Moscow to work their underground networks in search of mutants, Coca-Cola and MTV-inspired fashion had already beaten her there. But the world had been spared mechanical bulls, that was something.

“Never mind,” she said. “Point is, none of us are particularly good at making friends, but Erik is in his own league.”

Ororo sat down on the nearby ottoman, not looking away. Her gaze was bright and inquisitive. It was a silent invitation to continue. She could ask questions without even opening her mouth and had done almost constantly since they’d come back to the husk of the mansion. Not that she was shy about speaking—it was easy to see she’d been in charge back in Cairo, and even on unsure footing among strangers she wasn’t much good at the “listen and learn” strategy that worked for the quieter kids. Everything interested her and every answer earned three follow-up questions. She’d latched on to Raven immediately and unabashedly and Raven, somewhat to her own surprise, didn’t mind it overmuch. Ororo was a sharp kid and Raven was self-aware enough after all her years alone to admit that her ego appreciated the spot of hero-worship. She’d spent most of her life shouting to be heard over idiotic men like Charles and Erik; having someone desperate for her every word was a welcome change.

And as much as she hated to admit it to herself, she genuinely wanted to help Ororo. And that included catching her up on a hell of a lot of complicated history.

“Erik isn’t Magneto like I’m Mystique,” she said, trying to pick the words carefully. “Magneto is a mask he wears, to make himself strong. Or to forget the things that make him…well, he’d say weak. I’d say human. Like the fact that he cares about people. Has friends, or wants them. Actually I’m not sure he’d ever had a friend, before Charles.”

“They’re strange friends,” Ororo said.

Raven tried to think of another way to say _Well, that’s what happens when you fall in love with your nemesis._ That history might be a little _too_ complicated. She bunted instead.

“Stranger than you know, and yet less strange than they used to be. Ask Charles about it when he’s drunk some time.”

Ororo looked her age when she laughed, instead of the mid-20-something she could pass for when she scowled. A good reminder that Raven was old enough to be her mother, and that her schoolgirl crush, no matter how flattering, wasn’t something Raven could in good conscience encourage.

“So that’s how it’s going to be?” Ororo said, tilting her head in the direction of the kitchen. “They both know but don’t know the other knows so they’ll just…dance around each other like shy children until Peter works up his courage?”

Raven smirked a little. “Well, unless I transform into…I don’t know, Scott, or something, go in there and spill the beans, and then make a run for it…yeah, probably.”

“Men,” Ororo sighed.

That was exactly how it played out over the next few weeks. Erik blew hot and cold toward Peter, gradually warmed to him, still fed him and trained him in lieu of talking to him. Peter came up with a seemingly never-ending list of excuses for them to spend time together. They both needed new clothes, would Erik drive them to the mall? He wanted to fix up one of the motorbikes in the garage, could Erik help? He was trying to break his own record for fastest loop around the entire grounds, would Erik time him?

Peter’s cause succeeded in part because Charles had finally begun to recover. He left his room now, helped Hank and Raven with planning the reconstruction, spent time comforting the younger children and praising the older ones for their bravery. Almost simultaneously Erik moved into his own room down the hall and began avoiding Charles as assiduously as he’d hovered over him before. No one quite understood why, including Erik himself. Perhaps he thought of their closeness those first weeks as something he’d stolen only because Charles had been too weak to stop him. Perhaps he’d needed to let Charles heal before he pushed him away for not being Magda, like he’d pushed Peter away at first for not being Nina. Perhaps he wasn’t sure the two of them could ever coexist unless crisis forced them together and had retreated before Charles came to the same conclusion and sent him away. It hardly mattered; he had free time now that he wasn’t spending every second with Charles, and Peter laid claim to it with no compunction.

Raven and Ororo took bets on when and how the big reveal would finally happen, but neither of them guessed a quiet Wednesday evening.

Peter found Erik on the back veranda smoking one of the cigarettes he hid from Charles. He offered the pack in silence and they sat together inhaling the no-filter Camels while Peter tried not to cough and Erik watched the sun set. It had been a good day. A productive one. Erik’s muscles ached from manual labor and his metal-sense felt stretched, a little sore, but strong and fully under his control again. The flowers along the perimeter were flourishing, bright patches of color under sun-warmed stone. He was thinking about enlisting Jessie’s help with a rose garden.

“I didn’t know about you,” he said after awhile. “I can’t promise things would have been different if I had. My life was hardly my own at that time. But I didn’t leave you on purpose, if it helps.”

“You know,” Peter said. He sounded relieved.

Erik smiled a little. “Sorry if I stole your thunder.”

“No, no, it’s okay—I didn’t know how—with all the stuff that’s happened, y’know—”

Peter stuttered to a stop, the speech he’d been writing in his head since he’d seen Magneto on the news and realized their connection entirely forgotten. He went with the truth; couldn’t remember anything else. “I couldn’t find the right time. Sometimes I thought there just wouldn’t be one. There’s like this kid-shaped hole in your life and I don’t fit there. I don’t want to.”

“Good,” Erik said. “It helps that we both understand that Nina is irreplaceable. And that you are your own person, not part of the family I had before.” He softened. Tried another smile, this one shakier. “But I’d like you to be part of the family I am…trying to have now. I will struggle with her loss for a long time and I can only ask that you be patient with me. And listen, sometimes, if you want to. You should know about her, your sister.”

“That’d be awesome, yeah,” Peter said, trying and failing not to sound overeager.

Erik exhaled in that slow way of men who had braced themselves for a blow, felt none, and forced themselves to relax instead. “And I should warn you that my knowledge of parenting is limited to the needs of a seven-year-old. You already know how to feed and dress yourself, you don’t need driving lessons or dating advice…I’m not sure what I have to offer you. I may not be much of a father. But if something is better than nothing I’d like to get to know you better. Without the pretense, this time.”

“I had so many great excuses lined up though,” Peter pretended to whine. “Like, I was going to enlist your help with an epic prank that involved loosening all the bolts and screws in Scott’s room. One touch to the bed, table, dresser—bam, it all falls apart.”

Erik laughed, surprised and genuine. They fell into silence again but it had a different texture now, companionable instead of contemplative.

“What about my mom?” Peter asked after few minutes, grinding his cigarette butt into the marble steps to avoid looking at Erik’s face.

There was quiet for a long moment, long enough that Peter had his answer but also knew there was a longer explanation coming. At last Erik said, “She’s a good woman, your mother. She was kind to a stranger who desperately needed it. She may even have saved my life. I repaid her the best I could but I knew even then that we weren’t well suited. Too similar in some ways, too different in others. I left as soon as the worst of my injuries had healed but if I hadn’t, if I had been there when she found out she was pregnant with you, if I had stayed _for_ you…you wouldn’t have thanked me. Neither would she.”

“I worry about her sometimes,” Peter said, like one confession deserved another. “Her ex, my sister’s dad, is a total loser. She drinks more than she used to. Like she’s totally convinced the world’s about to end so why bother, y’know? She’s not happy and I wish I could fix it.”

“Your mother or the world?” Erik said.

Peter shrugged. “Both, I guess.”

“Neither is your responsibility. We all make our own choices.”

“See? You’re doing fine. That’s totally something a dad would say,” Peter said, just jokingly enough to serve as both sincere reassurance and permission to drop the subject of his mother. Erik didn’t love her, hadn’t ever, wouldn’t ever; his feelings about her were entirely neutral. That was fine—more than Peter had hoped for, when he had imagined Magneto’s volcanic anger and his mom’s ability to hold a grudge for decades going head to head and…obliterating the Eastern Seaboard, probably.

In fact the whole conversation had gone better than he’d dared hope it would. He’d been braced for a whole host of worst case scenarios, most of which involved a torrent of tears and extensive property damage and varied only in whose shoulder Magneto ended up crying on. But for all that he’d been raised on stories and warnings about the evil Master of Magnetism, Peter was starting to doubt that guy really existed. Aside from some pretty dark moments in Washington and Cairo after Magneto had experienced some seriously traumatic shit, Peter had only seen Erik, who was troubled but meant well, quiet and withdrawn even as he reeled from enough loss to drive anyone crazy. Erik had potential. If not as a dad, then at least as an interesting guy.

“I just have one question about your prank,” Erik said as they went up the stairs and back into the house. “Can we do Raven’s room too?”

A very interesting guy, Peter thought.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I'm trying to practice this omniscient narrator thing but I can't tell if it's working or if these chapters just sound unfocused. Stylistic thoughts plz??
> 
> Also I don't know what to write next so any input would be super sweet


	10. The Wildcard (1)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Guys I love Psylocke. I love Psylocke so much.

It was midafternoon a few months after Cairo and they were in one of the new study rooms on the second floor. Charles had decided to house his collection of scientific journals here—they had a sort of decentralized library system now—and almost immediately regretted it, since it meant innumerable trips from his office on the first floor whenever he needed to fact check or remember an old study for one of his own articles. (The installation of a new elevator had made the trip easier, at least, though Erik had agonized far longer than necessary over its construction, quadruple-checked every nut, bolt, and wire to ensure maximum smoothness and efficiency.)

He had only just managed to locate the April 1982 issue of the _European Journal of Biochemistry_ when Erik had wandered in with suspicious nonchalance, wearing the gray suit he’d been persuaded to buy the first and last time he’d taken “the girls” (Jean, Jubilee, Ororo) to the mall. He’d asked a few general questions about the article Charles was working on, which had earned him one-word answers and finally a raised eyebrow.

“Erik, you think small talk is an entirely pointless endeavor. You’ve called it a ‘social obligation to engage in inane pleasantries’ to my face so what, may I ask, do you really want?”

“Well, I was _trying_ to be polite.” Erik shrugged. “But since you put it that way, I want to go after Psylocke.”

The April 1982 issue of the _European Journal of Biochemistry_ made a distinct _thwap_ when it hit the floor.

 “I’m sorry, you want to do what?” Charles said.

Erik smirked. “You get more British when you’re offended, has anyone ever told you that?”

“And you get suicidal when you’re bored, apparently!”

“Charles,” Erik said reproachfully.

Charles thought his reaction quite measured, all things considered, even if his accent had thickened a little.

“I’m sorry. That was uncalled for, I was simply—surprised,” he said anyway. Over the past few months he and Erik had navigated countless personal, ideological, and conversational landmines and emerged on a rocky middle ground. He had learned that when it came to apologies, Erik cared about the gesture itself, not its sincerity, which was convenient since Charles rarely ever meant them.

“You can’t tell me you’ve never thought of finding her again.”

“It had occurred to me, yes,” Charles admitted. “So we agree on that. I have a feeling we’re going to differ on the subject of why, however.”

“I don’t like the idea of her out there at loose ends. And I don’t like to think of the ways she’ll occupy her time since taking over the world didn’t go quite as planned. She’s attracted to power and people who have it, even though she’s powerful enough to be dangerous on her own. More powerful than _he_ gave her credit for, and smarter too.”

Erik didn’t like to say En Sabah Nur’s name, even after all this time. He took refuge in marked intonation and euphemisms like “what happened in Cairo” and “after Poland” and “when I was with the others,” or sometimes just claimed he didn’t remember much, it was all a blur, will you stop pestering me about it Charles.

At least he didn’t have the same superstitious reluctance about the other Horsemen. He could dread the thought of what he’d done and loathe the being who’d manipulated him into doing it while still understanding the vulnerabilities that had allowed En Sabah Nur to seduce the four of them to his side. Even though he’d been recruited last, Erik had seen enough of the other three outside of battle to know what motivated them. He had wanted oblivion; Angel had wanted his wings back at any price; Ororo had wanted full agency. The younger kids told stories about the epic battle between the X-Men and Apocalypse in which the Four Horsemen were a kind of evil, mindless monolithic entity, but it wasn’t cognitive dissonance or a desire to distance himself from his actions that allowed Erik to express disdain for the dead Angel, affection for Ororo, and wariness about Psylocke.

“Our weaknesses were circumstantial,” Erik said. “A lust for power is a personality trait. Emma Frost had it or she would never have worked with Shaw. Psylocke was a mercenary before; she’s probably one again now. But she’s had a taste of the best there is—how long before she settles for the next best thing, do you think?”

“And what’s the next best thing to… _him_?” Charles said neutrally.

“Whoever rebuilds a viable nuclear arsenal first. China, the Soviets, the Americans. I hardly think she’ll care. Or another mutant with his ambitions.”

Something on Charles’s face must have given him away; a flicker of uncertainty, a hint of shame that the thought had even occurred to him, an echo of that sadness that had come to him every time he’d seen Magneto’s name in an alarmist newspaper headline. Some expression that said what he couldn’t: _are you so sure that isn’t you?_

“Not like that. And certainly not now. We’ve talked about this, Charles.”

Erik’s voice was firm, decisive, but not angry. The bottomless well of rage that had filled him had dried up since Cairo, perhaps even since Washington, leaving behind the dregs of a short temper and periodic fits of desolation that were more painful than his anger had ever been. He preferred to walk away from an argument now rather than win it. A shadow of himself after losing Magda and Nina or his truer self after ten years of happiness with them—it was impossible to tell. His dislike for humans certainly hadn’t waned but he no longer seemed to believe that property damage was the best way to go about expressing it. It was a passive hatred, slow-burning and unlikely to result in direct action.

For now, at least. Put him in the same room as someone like Psylocke and Charles wasn’t entirely sure. But there was no way to say that without implying distrust and they had worked so hard to come to a point where they could perhaps begin to trust each other again, despite past circumstances and natural inclination.

“Charles,” Erik said, more gently. He leaned against the desk, crossed his legs at the ankles. “I’m not bored, nor am I suicidal. I _am_ convinced that she could be a great threat to us.”

Something about his tone was off. Charles felt his heartbeat stumble, pick up again faster than before.

“Wait a minute. Do you want to go after her or _go after her_?” Erik’s expression went blank and he scrambled to defend himself. “Look, you do have a history of killing or attempting to kill mutants you consider a threat to our species as a whole. En Sabah Nur, Raven, Shaw. Tell me you never considered it.”

“Of course I considered it,” Erik said. “But I told you, she’s smart. She’d be an asset to our side, and to the X-Men, once I convince her that the next best thing to him is us. As I gather she noticed from the fact that she ran, we were the winning side. You, Jean, me—the power lies here, not at the side of some pathetic human dictator.”

“You want to…recruit her,” Charles clarified.

Erik made a vague gesture that seemed to indicate Charles had taken an obscenely long time to grasp a very simple concept.

It was exactly what Charles had wanted too but he felt compelled to play devil’s advocate where Erik and decision-making were concerned, even if it was a decision he agreed with. Force of habit, perhaps.

“This is a school. We have students, some of them very young. It seems the height of irresponsibility to bring in a former enemy of ours, a mutant with every reason to wish us ill. If she became aggressive she’d be a match for any of us, including you. And including me.” He hadn’t admitted to this before, saw Erik’s eyes glint with curiosity. “Her mutation was like nothing I’ve ever seen, Erik. Telekinesis and such precise control over psionic energy that she can make visible weapons and shields from it. And a natural telepathic resistance I haven’t seen since Logan. Even once En Sabah Nur had stopped shielding her I couldn’t read her mind. If she did attack, I’m not sure I could stop her with my powers.”

Erik pondered that for a moment, seemingly unconcerned. Then he mused, with a calmness Charles found entirely inappropriate considering how terrifying the implications were, “At first I thought it was his power that created the vortexes that let us travel from Westchester to Cairo in seconds, but it was hers. If she’s not a teleporter she’s the closest I’ve seen to it in a long time.”

“She’s a telekinetic, telepath-resistant teleporter?”

Erik grinned and nodded, like Charles had somehow proved his point. He smiled with all his teeth again these days, not that close-mouthed miserable thing that had passed for a smile those first weeks after Cairo. Charles ran his palm over the smoothness of his scalp. In the early days his fingers had been drawn to his bald head with the same compulsive need as a tongue drawn to the empty space after a tooth was removed—fascinated by the different texture, searching for something that should be there and inexplicably wasn’t. Now he ran his hand over his scalp in the same way he’d once run it through his hair—absently, when he was deep in thought or troubled. Or, as now, both.

“And what do you imagine she’ll do here, if your spiel works?” he asked. “If she’s as ambitious as you say I doubt she’ll be content teaching literature.”

“Well, of course not, _you_ teach literature. I thought we’d send her to your sister.”

“You want her to help Raven train the X-Men?”

“They’d be well-suited,” Erik said with certainty, like this idea wasn’t the worst in his long history of terrible ideas. He remained unperturbed when Charles gave an involuntary snort of laughter. “I’m serious, Charles. They’re not so dissimilar. Psylocke reminded me of what Raven could have been if she hadn’t met you.”

His tone was so sincere, so forthright, that Charles opened his mouth and found he had no words. Erik did this now—made these pronouncements about things he would never have revealed before. Thoughts, opinions, _feelings_. And all so guilelessly that Charles couldn’t bring himself to point out the strangeness of it. The last time they’d lived together in this house Erik had clutched all his secrets close like he expected to have them torn away from him as everything else in his life had been. He’d built shining mental barricades around the most mundane subjects; bright Keep Out signs blocked anything remotely personal, even inconsequential nonsense like his favorite color or food. He talked about his past more easily now, mostly about Magda and Nina, what he could remember of his parents and the time before the war, but sometimes, softly nostalgic, about their first class as it had been.

Then again, he was still _Erik._ And Erik was, always had been, a manipulative bastard.

_Psylocke reminded me of what Raven could have been if she hadn’t met you._

“You bloody wanker,” Charles said. “You’ve had that line in your pocket since the beginning, haven’t you? If I went to your room this instant I’d find your suitcase already packed, wouldn’t I?”

Another toothy grin. Erik didn’t even bother to act offended.

“Actually I thought we could stop by Cerebro first,” he said. “I could use coordinates more precise than ‘not here.’ Besides, you don’t think I’m doing this alone, do you?”

He tapped his temple with one finger. Charles raised an eyebrow suspiciously, suddenly certain that Erik’s worst idea in a long history of them was yet to come.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Kid!prompt and angst!prompt coming up soon but have I mentioned I love Psylocke?


	11. The Wildcard (2)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Erik angsts, is insecure, LIKE Y'DO

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> gah Erik's POV again oops. back to the omniscient thing next chap. figured this should be two shorter ones instead of one long one with weird pacing issues so psylocke next SORRY

Erik pulled the brim of his fedora lower on his forehead and scooted his small suitcase forward with the tip of his shoe. The line moved slowly but he heard no complaining, no wailing children as there might have been in any other airport queue after a long flight. Only a tense silence as they inched closer to the Soviet customs officials and their Beretta M12s at the arrival checkpoint at Prague–Ruzyně Airport. He felt his passport—fake, of course—in one pocket of his suit jacket and a carton of cigarettes in the other and wanted to reach for the second instead of the first. A habit he’d picked up to fit in at the factory. He put his hands in his pockets instead. Couldn’t draw attention to himself.

Not for the first time he wished Psylocke hadn’t gone back behind the Iron Curtain once she’d fled Cairo. She could have shaken off defeat in an Italian seaside village, an apartment in Barcelona, on a beach in Thailand—but she’d come to Prague, Charles had seen her there in Cerebro before her natural telepathic resistance had blocked him from pinpointing her location exactly. Prague, east of the river, that was the most he could say with certainty.

Erik knew the city well enough from the old days, might even have a handful of contacts still in place in some of the seedier hotels and bars who kept an eye out for people who didn’t want to be seen. He would find her. He’d worked the same kind of mutant underground networks when he’d come to Europe after Washington. London to West Berlin, West Berlin to East Berlin, and then up to Warsaw with the help of that mercenary Caliban and others like him. Not good or pleasant people, necessarily, but he knew how their minds worked. He knew how _her_ mind worked. Or had. That knowledge, the purview of the Nazi hunter he’d once been, had been buried in his mind beneath memories of Nina and Magda, his mother’s recipes and his daughter’s favorite bedtime stories, all the prosaic minutiae a father and factory worker needed. Things he treasured far more than how to lose a tail, interrogation tactics, and the basics of breaking and entering.

Yet that was what he needed to remember now.  Carefully, regretfully, he set aside the smell of Magda’s perfume and the silkiness of Nina’s hair when he brushed it for her before bed and reminded himself of the backstory of Max Eisenhardt, the name on his passport and papers. A businessman, Swedish, in search of his runaway little sister, Olivia. Hank had forged an entire intergovernmental correspondence between minor Swedish and Czech bureaucrats to confirm the story. It passed muster with the customs officials and he found himself outside the airport, where he lit up immediately and hailed a cab into the city center.

He changed taxis three times to be on the safe side. Between the second and third he ducked into a haberdashery and bought a new hat and suit jacket, leaving the old ones behind. The old habits resurfaced and after awhile he moved automatically, falling into that meditative state that passed the long stretches of waiting during the hunt between concentrated bursts of adrenaline and action.

He checked into the hotel at 7 p.m. after a day spent sitting down while planes and taxis did all the moving, yet somehow still managed to feel exhausted. Went up to his room, cased all possible exits, catalogued the metal. More old habits. It was a shitty old place, a dump the last time he’d been here and not at all improved in the decades since, with mold and god knew what else living in the corners, but safer than the upscale hotels where he’d be easy to track down. He shrugged off his coat, lay down on the mismatched comforter and pillows, closed his eyes for just a moment—

—and startled awake at the shrill ringing of the telephone on the bedside table.

The greeting he slurred was at least fifty percent curse words.

“Good evening to you too,” Charles replied, an audible smile in his voice.

Erik cursed again. “Is it eight already?”

“Your time, yes. Two in the afternoon mine, like we agreed. I take it your journey was taxing?”

“Shouldn’t have been,” Erik grumbled, rolling onto his back with the telephone cradled between his shoulder and ear. It was always easier to be honest over the phone. Something about the distance, or not being able to see the other person. “Yes. It was taxing. Everything is taxing.”

“I’m sorry, my friend,” Charles said, with a strange pause before the last word like he had almost let another endearment slip out. “Are you quite sure you won’t change your mind? Raven can be on a plane in the morning. You don’t have to do this alone—I’d really rather you not, in fact.”

“We’ve talked about this, Charles. I’ll keep you informed but I’m not one of your X-Men and I don’t require the use of the buddy system on missions.”

“You can’t blame me for caring.” A wry pause. “Actually you could and you would, isn’t that right?”

Erik shrugged and only after a long beat of silence realized that was hardly an answer in a telephone conversation. Not that one was required; he sensed the question had been largely rhetorical. He answered with a question of his own instead. “Why are you calling? On the phone, I mean.”

“Slight issue with Cerebro this morning. Hank’s fixing it now,” Charles said evasively.

“You mean something exploded. Well, at least you don’t have any hair to catch on fire now.”

“That was _one time,_ and I knew I shouldn’t have told you about it.”

Erik forced himself to ignore the laughter in Charles’s voice, the easy invitation to slip into the banter they’d only just rediscovered themselves capable of. “Is that true, about Cerebro?”

“Yes, of course,” Charles said, surprised.

“It was working perfectly when I left yesterday morning. I made sure of it.”

“I was trying to expand my reach—overloaded some circuits. Erik, what are you really asking?”

Charles sounded so genuinely confused that Erik felt a hint of self-reproach. Nothing like the stabbing guilt that still hit him every time he woke up from a dream of a Polish forest and an arrow he couldn’t stop, or when he saw mention of the death toll on the news, or when he remembered reducing Auschwitz to rubble. And it wasn’t as if he could hurt Charles much more than he already had. A pinch of guilt, that was all, but enough that he relented, forced down the suspicions, sighed. And told the truth.

“You once told me you were never getting inside my head again,” he said quietly. It was easy to pretend the words evaporated into the air instead of traveling halfway around the world. “Aside from a handful of times of crisis when lives were at stake or when you didn’t have full control of your powers, you’ve kept that promise. When I told you that Cerebro allowed private and untraceable communication and could be of strategic value, you agreed readily enough…but I can’t help but wonder if perhaps you’ve had second thoughts since then.”

Charles made an incoherent sound. “Erik, do you honestly think I sabotaged Cerebro so I wouldn’t have to talk to you telepathically?”

There was no dignified answer to that, so Erik said nothing. Charles made another sound, identifiable this time as a disbelieving snort.

“No,” he said firmly. “I haven’t had second thoughts. I’ll put Hank on the line if that’ll make you believe me—he’s down there now, rewiring the last panel. And I really don’t think it’s fair for you to complain when I’m in your head _and_ when I’m not.”

“Don’t make me talk to Hank,” Erik said, because it was easier to respond to that than to explain his obvious ambivalence towards Cerebro, towards Charles’s telepathy in general. The loss of privacy and control over his own thoughts was unbearable; equally unbearable was the intimacy, the sense of safety, the underlying affection he could feel even when Charles was angry with him or in pain. Two sides of the same dangerous coin. He went ten year stretches without that resented, beloved presence in his head, relying on patchy memories and dreams that never lasted quite long enough. It had taken all his courage and yet somehow been the most natural thing in the world to suggest Cerebro as a way to coordinate the mission to bring back Psylocke. Charles had agreed with none of the expected digs about Erik wanting him to stay out of his mind but none of the breathless relief Erik had half-anticipated either. Aside from the first few weeks after En Sabah Nur, when he had struggled to regain his equilibrium, Charles didn’t second-guess the use of his powers these days. He was stronger, prouder, unapologetic.

“Get some rest,” he said, gentler now. Erik reined in his wandering thoughts, unsure how long he’d been silent. “Exhaustion makes you more paranoid than usual. I’ll talk to you tomorrow. With Cerebro, so you can stop worrying.”

“I’m not _worrying,_ ” Erik said peevishly.

“You’re not a very good liar either. Stay safe, my friend.”

The _click_ as Charles hung up was loud in Erik’s ears.

He put the phone back in the cradle with enough force that the cheap plastic squeaked in protest. Felt unsettled and hated it. Anxieties barely assuaged, alone for the first time since he’d driven to the factory intending to kill the men he’d worked alongside for years, tired and hungry hours after the beer and rohlík he’d eaten that afternoon…

Erik struggled out of the rest of his clothes, climbed under the gritty blanket, and went back to sleep.


	12. The Wildcard (3)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Some half-hearted wikipedia-ing about Soviet Czechoslovakia and Psylocke's character later....

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fun fact I post things as soon as I finish them which means I wrote this since posting the last chapter yesterday which in turn means I was like, not at all productive at work today. Also this could be terrible but editing makes me anxious so I never do it. OH WELL.

He found her three days later, working for the biggest drug dealer in Czechoslovakia.

More accurately, he found her leaving a meeting she’d arranged on behalf of the biggest drug dealer in Czechoslovakia with an unassuming KSČ official that Erik suspected reported to someone close to Gustáv Husák, if not the man himself. Psylocke wasn’t the type to mess around with underlings. She _was_ the type to find a way to consolidate the powers of criminals and politicians, even if she had to plant the seeds of corruption herself. Erik wondered what she had promised the official. Kickbacks, product, a slice of the profits if they looked the other way on her boss’s business? Cooperation keeping the streets clean of the competition in return for a monopoly on the trade?

Not like it mattered, he thought as he trailed half a block behind her down the shadowy street. She slipped around a corner and he lengthened his stride to avoid losing her. Whatever she was doing, it was a waste of her talents—

There was a glowing psionic katana at his throat.

The face behind it didn’t look particularly pleased—or surprised—to see him.

“I heard you were looking for me,” Psylocke said. “Took you long enough. Out of practice?”

“I suppose so,” Erik said, eying the point of the blade. A normal katana like the one he could feel strapped to her back he could have magnetized to the ground in a second; this one could slice him through or scramble his brain just as fast.

“What do you want, Magneto? Or do you prefer Erik Lehnsherr now that you’re trying to fit in with the good guys?”

Erik ignored the dig. “For you to put that away, first of all. After that I thought we’d get a drink.” He bared his teeth in something that was almost a grin. “For old time’s sake. We go back, after all, don’t we?”

Her unfriendly expression didn’t change, but after a moment the blade in her hand vanished into thin air.

“I didn’t have plans tonight,” she said, shrugging. “I guess you’ll do. This way.”

They went up along the Vltava, around the edge of Staroměstska and into the heart of Josefov following a route Psylocke knew by heart but didn’t seem inclined to share. In the darkness and the twisting streets Erik’s sense of direction failed him quickly; if she decided to attack in one of these dark alleyways, he wouldn’t have a hope of escaping. Paradoxically that knowledge relaxed him. Once or twice he even thought of making small talk. Psylocke was more striking than he remembered—she’d cut her hair in a severe bob at her chin and wore more leather than seemed practical or comfortable, but it did emphasize the two blades crossed at her back. The occasional groups of men with poorly concealed weaponry in their jackets that passed them took one look at her and shied away. She had a reputation here, people knew her by sight. They respected her. Erik found that he liked that—it spoke to his old conviction that humans should acknowledge mutants as the superior species.

“Here,” she said, stopping at an unmarked door. She pressed a nearly-invisible button set into the stone in a series of starts and stops, some entry code, and then the door buzzed and clicked open. There was a steep staircase behind it, leading below ground level to another door. Erik barely had time to memorize the layout of the steps in the light from the street before the first door swung closed and they descended into the pitch-black.

The darkness and utter silence of the stairwell made coming out into the music and chatter and bright neon of the bar even more jarring. Something synth-heavy blared over the speakers. There was a drum kit in the corner and posters of punk bands plastered over the walls and Erik knew even without his metal-sense that everyone in the room was packing at least two weapons.

“Charming,” he said.

Psylocke smirked and nodded toward the bar. “Come on, you’re buying.”

Erik bought the obligatory Czech lager and they found a small booth in the corner furthest from the speakers. Sized each other up a little, drank in silence until Depeche Mode segued into The Cure.

“You’re wasted here,” Erik said over the opening lyrics to “Charlotte Sometimes.” “Bargaining with communists and drug dealers, after what we experienced with him? Doesn’t it offend you?”

“Things that offend me generally don’t last long around here,” she answered. Erik realized he’d never spoken to her with full awareness—he’d been half out of his mind with grief or power or both—or he would have remembered her hyperfocused, unblinking stare, like she could see right through him. Psionic powers, telepathy-resistant; he wondered if she didn’t have some hint of telepathy herself. Enough to influence him? It was too late to worry about that; they were already here.

“And how long will power in a small Soviet satellite nation entertain you, do you imagine?”

“Until I get a better offer. Is that why you’re here? I thought you ran with Xavier now, unless you got bored of his sentimental kumbaya bullshit already.”

Erik laughed. “You’re laboring under a severe misapprehension if you think Charles Xavier is boring. Two of them, if you think I’m his lackey. See, I tried that career path once not that long ago and found it…deeply unrewarding. How is it working out for you?”

“Be careful, Lehnsherr,” she said. “If you think our unique history will protect you, you might be disappointed.”

Erik knew he was pushing it already. Her lips were pressed together tight and unsmiling and a muscle in her jaw jumped. Not used to people questioning her or talking back. She’d invested too much time and energy in building a reputation as a tough, no-nonsense pro to allow weaknesses like friends or warmth. In a town where most people’s prized possession was their dad’s old ZB machine gun there wasn’t a lot of room for lightheartedness and the Soviets weren’t known for their sense of humor. Psylocke had to play to a rough crowd, no matter how much of her real self she had to repress to pull it off. No wonder Raven had been serious to the point of surly after all her time behind the Iron Curtain.

Looking at her he was reminded both of Raven and of himself as he had been once, back in his Nazi-hunting days when he’d convinced himself that loneliness was freedom. His self-hatred had plumbed such depths that he’d welcomed the anonymity of endless hotel rooms and sex with strangers who never learned his name in between murdering men who used aliases to try to escape their past crimes. Nothing in his life had been real or true. Smokescreens and feints, all of it. He’d seen the present only through the lens of the past and, perhaps inevitably, been blind to nearly everything. Revenge had provided the only clarity. Then had come Charles, the Brotherhood, Magda and Nina—guiding forces that had proved, however unwilling his belief, what Charles had told him the first night in the water.

“You’re not alone,” he told Psylocke, with none of Charles’s gentleness. “That’s all I’m here to tell you. Consider it an offer if you like, or remember it for when you’re done fucking around with humans in this backwater shithole.”

He started to stand up, was unsurprised when Psylocke grabbed his wrist.

“Wait. Whose idea was it for you to come here? Yours or his?”

“Mine. He agreed. Thought you could be—an asset.”

He had a feeling she wouldn’t appreciate any description that included the word _team._

“So you’re not striking out on your own. Remaking the Brotherhood.”

“Not yet,” Erik said. That was the truth too. He had considered it during idle conversations with Raven, ruminating on the good they had done, all they had meant to do. She’d told stories of the mutants she had rescued from labs, prisons, or underground fight clubs like the one where she’d found Kurt and Angel. How much easier it would be, how many more they could save, if they worked together and coordinated their attacks.

But Raven was done taking orders and ready to give them instead. She’d asked Charles for the X-Men, willing to compromise on means if it got better ends, promising to bring the ones they rescued to him instead of sending them back out in the world to fend for themselves. When she’d asked Erik to stand beside her, he’d said _I can’t_ almost automatically. Not when he could still remember the blissful sensation of letting go and completely losing control of himself and his powers. No matter what Charles said, he couldn’t be trusted in battle.

But that didn’t mean he was content to sit idly by and do nothing.

“I’m not convinced open aggression is mutantkind’s best option right now, unless wholesale slaughter is our end goal,” he said. “I don’t know about you, but my ideal outcome is mutants in positions of power the world over, in position for a coup when the time is right. One day the humans will wake up and find themselves usurped on all fronts. I think your particular skill set is uniquely qualified to help attain that goal.”

Psylocke looked intrigued. He saw the beginnings of a sly smile at one corner of her mouth. “And the professor?”

“Isn’t the pacifist he used to be. We can bring him around, if we do it carefully and slowly. He’s full of surprises.” Erik took a sip of the lager, contemplative. There was new steel in his voice when he added, “Let me make something very clear. At any given time my loyalties are split between mutantkind as a whole and Charles Xavier. After Cairo that balance has shifted by the day. If you put either of them in danger, I’ll pull all the blood in your body out through your eye sockets.”

For the first time Psylocke laughed, even seemed to relax a little. “There’s the Magneto I was expecting. What am I allowed to do, then, if not plot against your…old friend? Former nemesis? Star-crossed—”

“Enough,” Erik interrupted. “Work with Mystique on the X-Men. Teach them how to fight, how to protect each other, and how to outmaneuver the humans with and without their mutations. One of them has psionic powers too—telepathy and telekinesis. She’s strong but untrained.”

Psylocke’s growing enthusiasm became wariness again in an instant. “The telepath from Cairo?”

“Her name is Jean.”

“Well, last time I met _Jean_ and these other X-Men of yours we didn’t exactly get along. What guarantee do I have that that laser-eyed kid won’t blast me back out the door the second I walk in?”

Erik shrugged. “When you put it like that not much of one at all, but they listen to Charles and Charles listens to me. And he agreed I should come here, so you do the math.”

He could see the gears churning in her head, behind her carefully blank expression. Could see the boredom verging on exhaustion in her body language when she looked around the headache-inducing neon-lit bar and envisioned months or years spent here, safe but trapped, and all for what? There were limits here and one day she would reach them, and she was ambitious in that way that necessitated a new goal every time the old one was met. She became restless and unhappy otherwise, needing something new to prove to herself, or perhaps someone else. He didn’t know her, really, but he knew her kind. He _was_ her kind. Dangerous and damaged, but—Charles would say—perhaps not beyond saving.

“I’ll talk to Xavier,” she said finally. “But if I don’t like what I hear I walk away, got it?”

Erik tipped back the last of his beer, wondering if they could get a keg to go. It was good stuff. Charles would appreciate it. “Deal.”

“Just like that?”

“Just like that.”

She stared at him for a long stretch of time. Erik didn’t look away, letting her search for and fail to find some weakness, hesitation, or duplicity in him. At last she said, “I can’t decide if you’re inspired or insane, coming to me like this.”

“Call it both,” Erik said. He sketched a vague oval in the air to indicate her ability. “Will you do the honors? No time like the present.”

Psylocke scoffed.

“Do _not_ get used to this,” she said. Then she extended a hand, which began to shine purple in the refracted light from the psionic energy that coalesced and hovered in front of her palm. She made a slight pushing motion and it floated away, then started to expand until it was Erik’s height and the other bar patrons could no longer pretend to ignore that an energy vortex was forming in their midst. They gawped openly, drinks forgotten.

“Mind your own fucking business,” Psylocke snapped as she gestured for Erik to go through first. He obeyed, only a little doubtful.

And a fraction of a second later they were standing on the gravel driveway of the newly-rebuilt mansion and Charles was pushing a gentle _Welcome back, both of you_ into their heads.


	13. Triage

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hank didn't ask for this, is long-suffering. (Rewind to immediately post-battle).

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter was supposed to be about how fucking creepy Apocalypse's violation of Charles's telepathic and physical autonomy was and instead it became about...not that. I couldn't figure out a transition from Hank and Erik to that so consider this short, awful chapter a...prelude, or something? Someone asked for something with Hank, right?

Hank made do with an assortment of first aid kits at first. They had no infirmary, after all. Fortunately they didn’t have much more than scrapes and bruises, either, aside from Peter’s broken leg and Charles’s…state. Whatever that was. Something between a deep sleep and a kind of catatonia that made Hank wish for the EEG and EKG and all the scanners that had been incinerated along with the lab. When he peeled up Charles’s eyelids the pupils were fixed pinpoints, no response to stimuli like light or pain. Jean used wet wipes to clean the blood from his temples and looked down at him with a confused frown, like what she was seeing with her eyes didn’t match what she was sensing with her telepathy.

“Is he in there?” Hank said, trying to lighten the mood.

“I don’t know,” she said, bewildered. Twenty-four hours ago she’d been shy, uncomfortable with her powers; now she used them like it was second nature and knew when they let her down that something was wrong with the other person, not her. “He’s very far away. Almost as far as when I nearly lost him in Cairo.”

“Can you bring him back? It would do a lot for morale if the kids could see he’s fine.”

For all of them, Hank didn’t need to say.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Jean said. “He’s all…bruised, telepathically. Apocalypse made it so he could feel everyone in the world. Like a television with the volume turned all the way up? I’m not sure he could handle even the few of us right now.”

Hank felt the warmth of a blush invisible under his blue fur. Of course there would be invisible damage; just because Charles hadn’t fought physically didn’t mean he was unharmed. Rescuing him and defeating En Sabah Nur would only be the first step in his recovery, no matter how desperately they wished for the unflappable, perfectly controlled Professor X back again. It had been a long few days, Hank thought, with more to come before he could even think of resting. Especially if Charles took as much time to recover as Jean was suggesting. He took a moment to wish Moira hadn’t left them at JFK for the first flight to DC. To see her son and deliver a briefing in their defense, she’d said, but Hank knew it was to get some distance from Charles and process her new-old memories in peace. He missed her level-headedness already.

Instead, in a theme that was far too familiar in his life, Moira had disappeared and Erik wouldn’t go away.

The current bane of Hank’s existence chose that moment to stumble back into the room, catching himself on the doorframe and coughing out something that was probably supposed to be Charles’s name before it hitched in his throat and sounded like phlegm instead. He had ricocheted between being sick and being unconscious the whole plane ride home and seemed set to continue that pattern in one of the few bedrooms left undamaged, which they’d established as Charles’s for the time being and Erik had apparently decided he was sharing. Moira had posited on the plane that everyone who had been touched by En Sabah Nur’s powers would experience some kind of crash or withdrawal symptoms at first. As usual, Charles and Erik seemed to exist at opposite ends of a spectrum, with purely psychic side effects on one side and purely physical ones on the other.

Erik took a few shaky steps into the room, stared at Charles’s body on the other bed like it had been years since they seen each other instead of the five minutes Erik had been in the bathroom throwing up whatever was left in his stomach. Couldn’t be much, by this point. He looked like hell, with the lost fragility of a man whose center of the universe had vanished and who was trying, desperately and unsuccessfully, to find something—someone—new to reorient himself around. It was also possible that wasn’t entirely a metaphor—if he’d lost the ability to sense every fragment of metal in the ground and the slightest fluctuation in the earth’s magnetic fields, his balance was bound to be off in more ways than one.  

“Charles,” he said, raspy but coherent this time.

“You’re killing me here,” Hank muttered. “I told you he’s sleeping, Erik, he can’t hear you.”

“I know that.” But it came out like a question and there was something awful and empty in Erik’s eyes. Hank wondered if he had hit his head at some point; a blow from the inside of that unpadded helmet could spell concussion or worse. Erik swallowed visibly. “When—will he—?”

“When he’s ready,” Jean answered when Hank looked to her for help.

Erik looked at Jean with a mixture of relief and jealousy. “He told you that? He’s in your head?”

“It’s probably more accurate to say that I’m in his,” she said.

Erik remained frozen in the middle of the room, like he’d forgotten how to move and hold a conversation at the same time. His balance was a little unsteady, his voice distant. “I felt it take hold of him. He was talking to me and that—that _thing,_ it reached through me. For Charles. It wanted him—it _wanted_ him.”

They couldn’t tell if he broke off coughing, gagging, or something else.  

“That’s what happened in Cerebro?” Hank said. “We couldn’t tell what was going on. The whole thing looked like a trap to me.”

“No,” Erik said, too shaken to take offense as he usually would. Too shaken to lie, too. “I didn’t lead him here, I didn’t give him Charles—at least I didn’t mean to. But I was the bridge, the conduit. Is it the same?”

“He needs to lie down,” Jean said, watching Erik warily.

Hank was already in motion. He cupped Erik’s elbow, gentle with his claws, and guided him toward the room’s other bed so that when his legs gave out a few seconds later he collapsed on the mattress instead of the floor. His feelings about Erik were complicated and usually fell somewhere between irritation and resentment, but it was difficult to hold a grudge when the former greatest threat to humankind looked so human himself. Not just human—sick. Eyes red and swollen, splotches of color high in his cheeks, and without the bulky armor he was lean, almost too lean to be healthy. Skeletal fingers locked around Hank’s wrist as he eased a pillow underneath Erik’s head and tried to pull away.

“None of it was a dream, was it?” he said mournfully. “Magda and Nina, just like my parents…just like Charles…all taken away…”

“I’m sorry about your wife and daughter,” Hank said, sincere but deeply uncomfortable. He was certain Erik would be too, if he was more aware of what was going on. “You should get some sleep. You can see Charles when you wake up, all right?”

“Yes,” Erik sighed. Hank wasn’t sure if he fell asleep or passed out, but it happened fast. He hooked a claw into the blanket folded at the foot of the bed and yanked it up and over Erik’s shoulders, made a mental note to find him some clothes that weren’t the generic black shirt and pants he’d had on under the armor. They didn’t look comfortable, or like something Erik would want memories of.

“I’ll watch them both,” Jean said. Hank jumped a little and she smiled. “You know, I bet Dr. MacTaggert would come back if you called and asked her like, really nicely. She’s mad at the Professor, not you.”

“I’ll think about it,” Hank hedged. Did telepathy come with knowing smirks as part of the mutation or was it just something Jean had picked up from Charles? An important scientific inquiry worth pursuing, once he had a functioning lab again.

Under the blanket, Erik’s fingers twitched like he was reaching for something just out of his grasp. If Jean hadn’t been so busy teasing Hank and Hank hadn’t been so busy blushing, they might have caught the way Charles’s hand twitched too.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Does Jean ship Hank and Moira? Do _I_ ship Hank and Moira??


	14. Vortices

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Post-Apocalypse PTSD.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For Charlotte, who requested Charles Not Dealing, feat. Super Disjointed Writing!

The altar’s stone was cold on his back through the thin cashmere of his sweater. A becoming lavender; why had he worn it that day? To impress Moira? His schoolboy crush seemed silly now. He’d violated her mind unjustifiably twenty years ago and she’d still flourished. A family and career all on her own, and she’d personally gone in search of En Sabah Nur before they even knew he existed. Putting herself in the line of danger while Charles had been playing headmaster to a bunch of kids in a little utopian bubble. Indiana Jones versus Obi-Wan Kenobi hiding on Tattoine.

Inane pop culture references at a time like this. Maybe it was his mind bending away from the looming pressure of En Sabah Nur’s consciousness, a power greater and a will stronger than his own. He was suddenly reminded of Sebastian Shaw, how he could press on a single square inch of skin hard enough to break bone. Not the sharp pain of a stab wound but blunt force trauma, impossible to bear up under because it wouldn’t let up long enough to let you marshal defenses. He couldn’t even catch his breath. Felt like the stone was lying on top of him instead of the other way around.

 _Erik, you were right,_ he thought. But Erik wasn’t here. Erik couldn’t hear. Doing a false god’s bidding somewhere, with that damn helmet…in return for what? What had he been promised that Charles couldn’t also have given him? Oblivion, if his desolation on the rocks had been anything to go by. Charles had always tried to give Erik good memories, resist the temptation to take away the bad ones. That was cheating, wasn’t it? Professors didn’t cheat. It set a bad example for the students.

_Relax, Charles. Soon we will be one, and you will know true power._

That stentorian voice echoed in the empty confines of his skull where his own mind had once resided. Soon En Sabah Nur would take up residence there himself and there would be nowhere for Charles to go. Perhaps he would survive as some gibbering mad voice in the back of En Sabah Nur’s head while he walked the world in Charles’s body, getting the blood of billions on Charles’s hands. He wondered what had happened to the mutants before him. Their powers had been absorbed but what of their minds, the people they had been? Had they been allowed to die or did they live on still somewhere inside En Sabah Nur, trapped in tortuous immortality?

He’d find out soon enough, Charles thought as the pressure increased. On his lungs, inside his head, the metal shackles around his wrists tightening. An invisible vise around his skull with pressure points at his temples, boring holes in bone to set his telepathy free. Somewhere far away he registered that he was mixing his metaphors; there were no words for things like this. They’d never been needed before.

_Don’t fight me, Charles. The sooner you give in the sooner the transformation will be complete. Relax. Welcome me as I deserve to be welcomed._

He was fading so quickly that he had to work backward from the ten stinging points of pain that were fingernails digging into his forehead to realize that he could move his wrists again. The restraints were gone. The echo of crushing force applied to delicate bone throbbed in his whole hand. And a shadow was leaning over him. A familiar voice.

“We’re getting out of here. Just calm down—”

Hands on him, and words too close to En Sabah Nur’s inexorable cajoling. Charles shoved up as hard as he could and the shadow fell away, followed by the thud of something heavy hitting the floor. Muttered curses, something about always having to do things the hard way. Then the cold stone under his back was replaced by a thin sheet of metal and he was lifted into the air. His own bloody magic carpet after one thousand and one nights of torture—or only a few minutes, time didn’t mean a thing when everything you were was being slowly crushed out of existence. He twitched again, still feeling the creeping tendrils of a foreign power in his head even though the pressure was abating. The edges of the metal widened so he wouldn’t fall.

Then stillness. Sun on his face and warmth on his skin. He soaked it up, thinking it might take years to defrost. He’d never been so cold.

“Charles, can you open your eyes? It’s over now, you’re safe.” A pause. “If I touch you will you hit me again?”

“Jean,” Charles sighed.

Careful fingertips checked his pulse, his temperature, the blood at his temples. “No, not Jean. It’s Erik, Charles. What the hell did he do to you?”

“Not Jean,” Charles corrected himself. Why couldn’t Erik keep up—of course Charles knew it was him, he’d know Erik anywhere, but there was something else, something crucial, just out of reach. It involved Jean. No, not Jean. “The Phoenix. Is she safe?”

His eyelids felt weighted down with cement but he forced them open, already wincing away from the sun. Instantly there was a palm above him to block the light, casting everything into bearable shadow, including the worried frown on Erik’s face.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said. “Who is the Phoenix?”

“We can’t defeat him without her.”

He’d never get En Sabah Nur out of his head without her either. Even with the transformation process halted he was still in there, lurking around the edges of Charles’s consciousness, probing at the strands of his telepathy and gleefully fantasizing about how he’d use it to enslave the world. The pain in Charles’s temples spiked as he dug his fingernails into the open wounds, half-convinced he could pry En Sabah Nur out himself if only he could reach deep enough. Erik snatched his hands away, held them still while he leaned back on his heels. He was staring at the blood under Charles’s nails but thinking of something else. He seemed perplexed.

“I don’t think it happened this way,” he said slowly.

Charles struggled to focus. “What?”

“We’ve been here before, but I’m not the one who rescued you. I didn’t join you until later, once your people had already freed you from the pyramid. The blue boy, Nightcrawler.”

“You’ve never met Kurt,” Charles said, with less certainty than he liked.

“Are you so sure about that? I’m not.” Erik surveyed the rocky terrain, got that distant look in his eyes that meant he was casting out with his metal-sense as well. “Where are the others now, Charles? There should be a battle raging around us, but look. Listen.”

Stillness and quiet. Sunlight and a soft desert breeze, warm air caressing Erik’s unkempt hair. It was ruffled like he’d just woken up, not flattened and sweat-soaked as it would have been if he had recently been wearing the helmet.

“You mean this isn’t real?” Charles said, and hated the desperate hopefulness in his voice.

Erik shook his head, hesitant at first and then gaining confidence. “I don’t think so. I think you pulled me into one of your nightmares. By accident, I hope.”

“Oh,” Charles said on an exhale that sounded slightly hysterical. He wanted to believe it was the truth so badly that it took a moment to force his thoughts into some semblance of working order and realize that that was exactly what En Sabah Nur would say to lull him into complacency. Get him to relax enough to loosen his shields and then worm his way too deep for even Jean to extricate. Erik might not even be Erik. En Sabah Nur knew that of all the faces he could wear, Erik’s would be most effective, he’d known ever since he’d reached through Erik to Cerebro and seen everything they’d meant to each other, once and still. Charles looked at Erik with new suspicion, searching every line of his face for some indication of falsehood. Christ, he looked so much older.

“You think I’m lying to you,” Erik said. “I’m not.”

“Then why can I still feel him in my head?” Charles snapped. He heard his own voice like it belonged to someone else, someone well on their way to losing their mind. High and frantic. “You say it’s over but he’s in there eating away at my mind like some kind of cancer—like an infestation, a, a cockroach! He won’t go away and only the Phoenix can kill him, I’m not strong enough, I tried—”

“Shhh,” Erik said. It wasn’t comfort but a command—which, coming from Erik, was supposed to be comforting. And coming from Erik, it was. The hands on his face were strong and steady, anchoring where they should have been claustrophobic. “She did kill him, we all felt it happen. She let go just like you told her to. Your mind is so powerful you’re reliving what happened instead of remembering it but believe me, Charles, he’s gone. Wake up and you’ll see I’m right.”

“I’m telling you, he’s here! What if my being unconscious is the only thing keeping him from taking me over and annihilating everyone? It’s not safe for me to wake up.”

“I don’t think that’s how it worked,” Erik said dubiously.

It was becoming increasingly difficult to believe that En Sabah Nur could be manipulating Erik or hiding behind his face. This Erik was so very… _Erik._ The same dry humor in the worst circumstances, the same ability to see through subterfuge and tendency to never issue requests when he could give commands. And a terrible liar, not because he was some paragon of morality but because he wanted to be right all the time, about everything. Perhaps Charles could trust him after all.

“I’ll wake up if you say something you’d never say if he was still controlling you, or this,” he bargained, gesturing around them. “Something that convinces me he’s really gone from all of us, including me. Not only will I wake up, but I’ll apologize for dragging you into my nightmares for what I assume is probably not the first time.”

Erik cocked his head and thought for a moment. Then he looked Charles squarely in the eye and said, “I was going to bring Nina to you one day. Well, we were. Magda always wanted to see New York City. She liked the old Hollywood movies, the ones with the big dance numbers. I promised her that I would take her to a Broadway show. And I promised Nina I would take her to meet my old friend Professor X, who ran a school for special children like her, where she’d never have to hide the wonderful things she could do. I failed them both, even more catastrophically than I failed you once. Destroying every human on the planet wouldn’t have changed that.”

Those silent tears he produced so copiously now streaked his face by the end. Literal streaks in the dust Charles’s mind had covered them both in, replicating the Egyptian wind thick with sand that it remembered from the last time they’d be here. No, the only time they’d been here. This wasn’t real. Charles remembered.

“I’m sorry,” he said, meaning more than the apology he’d promised. And he saw the way Erik forced down his grief, stopped the tears, redirected his focus.

“Can you still feel him in there?” Erik pressed the tip of his finger to the center of Charles’s forehead. Charles felt the obscene urge to do something stupid like kiss it or hold Erik’s knuckles against his cheek, to bring him somehow closer. Though how much closer could they possibly be when Erik was already in his mind?

“Little cockroach legs skittering around in the back of my head,” he said. It didn’t feel any less real just because it wasn’t. “Phantom sensations, muscle memory. Takes time, these things. Felt my legs sometimes for years after.”

“But you believe me.”

“Yes.”

“Wake up and prove it, then.”

Charles swallowed the truth and nodded instead. The truth that he didn’t want to wake up. That he wanted to stay here under the warm sun until the ice in his bones melted. Or perhaps not _here—_ he could feel sand crunching between his teeth already, but somewhere safe inside his head, with Erik. It would be easy as breathing to reshape their surroundings. The steps of the Lincoln Memorial, the mansion as it used to be, somewhere they’d been happy or somewhere they’d never been at all. Where Charles could put himself back together unbeholden to anyone and Erik could grieve in the way he wouldn’t allow himself now. But he held back from begging pathetically because he had promised, and because that longing to remain safe here just a little longer felt so deeply entrenched that he knew this wasn’t the first time he’d brought Erik into his nightmares. There was a sense of déjà vu about this conversation, what was real and what wasn’t. Erik bringing him back from the brink and telling him to face the world. Maybe it began differently sometimes but they had ended up here before and would again.

They’d earned their rest.

Next time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i kinda made it A Thing that Charles is unconscious for days after the battle, so in my brain Erik wakes up after this and Charles doesn't, and whenever Erik goes to sleep he just gets pulled back into the same flashback over and over and neither of them fully realize this has happened before because *handwavy telepathy-related reasons*


	15. Drill Sergeant

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The beginning of what would have been the prank war

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> AKA I have lost all steam on this drabble series, this is literally all I have, will someone please finish it while I start this new long post-XMA fic I promised

“Mystique is such a hardass,” the kids said after training when they thought she couldn’t hear, which most but not 100% of the time they were right about. And sure, if she _did_ hear them odds were she’d be more likely to laugh and high-five Mr. Lehnsherr than be offended, but the end of every session left them worn out and sore and it felt good to complain.

“How else are we supposed to learn how to fight?” Ororo protested with such regularity they would have teased her if they hadn’t still been a little scared of her. Everyone knew about her crush on Mystique except Ororo herself. But even she defended her hero more out of habit than real appreciation for the long sparring sessions, the Danger Room drills, the lectures on strategy and tactics.

At least training gave their days structure. They found themselves at loose ends a lot. The mansion could barely be called a home; it certainly wasn’t a school again, not yet. All the rooms had walls and doors and ceilings and that was something, but even furniture was a recent acquisition and the Professor had said they could consider summer holidays begun early. Most of the younger kids who could went home, picked up by worried parents who seemed only marginally mollified by the now-recognizable exterior of the mansion. There wasn’t much to do aside from train. Help with reconstruction when they could. Even Kurt got bored of the mall after awhile and they saw Return of the Jedi so many times they could recite the dialogue by heart, then got kicked out of the movie theater after other patrons didn’t appreciate a live demonstration.

All things considered it was inevitable that things would go to pieces.

It was also inevitable that Peter would start it, but no one suspected Mr. Lehnsherr until it was too late.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This whole sandbox is free to a good home while I torture our fave fictional characters some more soooo...keep an eye out for that I guess?


End file.
